Seems to me that sama and Microsoft have been on fairly equal footing since the 49:51 % deal was made.
Then a seismic shift underneath Sam but Microsoft has enough stability and resources to more than compensate for the part of the 51% that was already in OpenAI's hands, which might not be under Sam's purview any more if he is kicked out.
But then again it might be Sam's leadership which would still effectively be in place from a position at Microsoft anyway, or it might end up making more sense for him to also be in a position at OpenAI, maybe even at the same time, in order to make the most of their previous investment.
Kicking out Sam was obviously an emotional decision, not anything like a business decision. Then again OpenAI is not supposed to be an actual business. I don't think that should be an excuse for an unwise or destructive decision. It was not an overnight development, even though it took Sam by surprise. When I see this:
>the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI
I understand that to mean that the board was not behind him 100% for quite some time, but were fine with him going forward believing otherwise. Some uncandidness does seem to have taken place and there may or may not have been anything Sam could have done about it.
This was simmering for a while and it will require more than one weekend for everyone involved to regroup.
Which is what they're doing now, observers can see a whirlwind, actual participants really have something on their plate.
Some things will have to be unraveled and other things weaved from the key ingredients, I would say it's really up to Sam and Microsoft to hash this out so it's still some kind of something like an equal deal among them. Regardless of which employer(s) Sam may end up serving in leadership positions, and the bulk of the staff will be behind Sam in a way the OpenAI board was not, so the employees will be just as well off regardless of the final structure.
This was quite a hasty upset but deserves a careful somewhat gradual resolution.
I see it somewhat different. The way I see it is that in a well stocked board (enough members and of sufficient gravitas) this decision would have never been made and if it would have been made it wouldn't have been made this way. The three outside board members found a gullible fourth and pushed their agenda with total disregard for the consequences because a window opened where they could. So they took their 15 minutes in the spotlight and threw out Sam, thinking they could replace him with someone more malleable or more to their liking. But the fact that they are the outside board members to begin with and that their action has utterly backfired puts the lie to their careful consideration and the case building against Sam, this is just personal. No board in its right mind would have acted like this and I'm relatively confident that if this all ends up in court it's going to end up with a lot of liability for the board members that do not defect and even the ones that defect may not be able to escape culpability: you are a board member for a reason, and you can't just wave a card that says 'I'm incompetent therefore I'm innocent'. Then you should have resigned your board seat. This stuff isn't for children.
