Same, but some animals are more equal than others. I'd personally trust one of those Japanese companies that lasted hundreds of years more on questions like stability and carefulness, compared to a flash-in-the-pan SV startup that's been around since 2016.
And also how a board of academics + Adam + Ilya of a nonprofit ostensibly optimizing for "humanity" might not consider someone like that the best fit for representing the nonprofit, especially if he was gaslighting them and treating them like NPCs.
My story: Maybe they had lofty goals, maybe not, but it sounded like the whole thing was instigated by Altman trying to fire Toner (one of the board members) over a silly pretext of her coauthoring a paper that nobody read that was very mildly negative about OpenAI, during her day job. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-...
And then presumably the other board members read the writing on the wall (especially seeing how 3 other board members mysteriously resigned, including Hoffman https://www.semafor.com/article/11/19/2023/reid-hoffman-was-...), and realized that if Altman can kick out Toner under such flimsy pretexts, they'd be out too.
So they allied with Helen to countercoup Greg/Sam.
I think the anti-board perspective is that this is all shallow bickering over a 90B company. The pro-board perspective is that the whole point of the board was to serve as a check on the CEO, so if the CEO could easily appoint only loyalists, then the board is a useless rubber stamp that lends unfair legitimacy to OpenAI's regulatory capture efforts.
I think it was only a competitor app after GPTs came out. A conspiracy theorist might say that Altman wanted to get him off the board and engineered GPTs as a pretext first, in the same way that he used some random paper coauthored by Toner that nobody read to kick Toner out.
I think it's important to keep in mind that BOTH Altman and the board maneuvered to threaten to destroy OpenAI.
If Altman was silent and/or said something like "people take some time off for Thanksgiving, in a week calmer minds will prevail" while negotiating behind the scenes, OpenAI would look a lot less dire in the last few days. Instead he launched a public pressure campaign, likely pressured Mira, got Satya to make some fake commitments, got Greg Bockman's wife to emotionally pressure Ilya, etc.
Masterful chess, clearly. But playing people like pieces nonetheless.
Actually I think Bill would be a pretty good candidate. Smart, mature, good at first principles reasoning, deeply understands both the tech world and the nonprofit world, is a tech person who's not socially networked with the existing SF VCs, and (if the vague unsubstantiated rumors about Sam are correct) is one of the few people left with enough social cachet to knock Sam down a peg or two.
I couldn't find any source on her investing in any AI companies. If it's true (and not hidden), I'm really surprised that major news publications aren't covering it.
I guess Metz would have a lot of sympathy for someone drawing the heat of the entire internet, and even powerful VCs, by doing something that many people think is destructive "on principle".
Random fanfiction: it's also possible that it wasn't actually a 3-3 split but more like a 2-2 split with 2 people -- likely Adam and Ilya, though I guess Adam and Tasha is also possible -- trying to play nice and not obviously "take sides." And then eventually Sam thought he won Adam and Ilya's loyalty re: firing Helen but slipped up (maybe Adam was salty about Poe and Ilya was uncomfortable with him "being less than candid" about something Ilya care about. Or maybe they were more principled than Sam thought).
And then to Adam and Ilya, normally something like "you should've warned me about GPTs bro" or "hey remember that compute you promised me? Can I prettyplease have it back?" are stuff that they are willing to talk it out with their good friend Sam. But Sam overplayed his hand: they realized that if Sam was willing to force out Helen under such flimsy pretexts then maybe they're next, GoT style[1]. So they had a change of heart, warned Tasha and Helen, and Helen persuaded them to countercoup.
