OpenAI has yet to confirm what will happen to the three independent board members who voted Altman out. The New York Times reported Wednesday that OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, academic Helen Toner and robotics entrepreneur Tasha McCauley have all agreed to step down. Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who was among the four board members to vote out Altman, appears for now to be staying.
As Bloomberg Opinion columnist Matt Levine has written, OpenAI’s efforts to thread the needle between governing a for-profit company and a non-profit organisation were convoluted and doomed for its investors from the start.
At the very top of OpenAI’s byzantine structure was a board that answered only to their moral instincts. For some still-inscrutable reason, they deemed Altman dishonest, and thus an impediment to the safe harbouring of AGI (artificial general intelligence), or AI systems that could surpass human intelligence.
Although the setup was quite good for humanity, it was always a problem for Microsoft. It’s why Satya Nadella and his chief financial officer, Amy Hood, initially hesitated to invest US$1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, according to a person familiar with Nadella’s thinking.
But they eventually committed the money that year, and then another US$10 billion last January to give them a 49 per cent stake – and no board seat.
