Non-profits totally have boards with fiduciary duties. Just because it’s a non profit doesn’t mean it isn’t being juiced for money by others. It just means that the org can’t make a profit, but it can totally spend its money unwisely so that it winds up in someone’s pockets. Heck, most of America’s hospital systems are like that.
The “fiduciary duty“ of a nonprofit, such as it is, is just securing operating funds so that it can Fulfil its mission. Altman has been spectacularly successful at achieving that goal by obtaining $10 billion in funding. Better, cheaper, or more power efficient chips, whatever the source, would absolutely help through the mission too. and that of course is assuming they actually buy or use them at all in the first place. Firing him on the grounds that it could potentially be a bad deal that “lines his pockets“ sometime in the future seems premature.
I think it’s a real stretch to say this chip company would be a violation of his “fiduciary duty“ to open AI. The best argument you could make is that he has a conflict of interest with a competitor. But again, open AI is a nonprofit. It doesn’t have “competitors“. Either it has the funding it needs and is fulfilling its mission or it isn’t.
It's still not clear to me how a board member prospectively running a chip company (a related but different business) works against OpenAI's interests. And people here seem to be making an awful lot of assumptions in order to somehow connect those dots.
Sam Altman has inside information on OpenAI's current and future hardware needs. Sam Altman as CEO, was in a position to direct OpenAI's current and future hardware purchases.
How can he separate those concerns from having his own hardware initiative put together precisely to serve OpenAI and its competitors hardware needs?
Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
This situation smacks of the ethically questionable transition to a closed/profit organization, after receiving initial funding based on their being an open/non-profit organization. (Apparently the original funders didn't retain any veto power over such a transition, to the regret of at least one significant donor.)
>Without an agreement with the OpenAI board on how these conflicts of trade secret information and executive power can be settled (Significant shares in the new company for OpenAI?) no competent board would put up with this.
I would say if they really did anticipate and worry about such an issue, a competent board would work toward forging such an agreement, rather than firing the CEO years before the aforementioned chip company even existed and before telling any of their other stakeholders.
I’m not taking a side here because I don’t know the facts of the case. But a conflict of interest is a huge deal because it could lead to spending more money than necessary, and is also the main way people juice non profits for profits somewhere else. Of course, if they start a chip company out in the open and not granting it money or guaranteed business from the non profit, things might be up to standard.
