To the public: For the normal PR reasons that every large enterprise is subject to caring about. To employees: I suspect substantially less than the like 95% of employees who came down against the board would have done so if the board had explained what they were thinking. There are probably at least a few people there who are not comfortable viewing themselves as rank mercenaries in service to a profit-and-power-motivated game-player, and actually joined OpenAI with some belief in its mission. But maybe not! I dunno.
And how did that attitude work out for them? Upwards of 90% of their staff threatened to bail out, every single one of them look like fools in public, and I would be shocked if there were not some recriminations behind closed doors from the likes of Microsoft's CEO.
It’s not an “attitude.” It’s the legal structure of the corporation’s leadership. They were no more capable of incorporating the public will than an individual is capable of taking a vote on the flow of traffic on a public highway. That is to say, even if they had done what is proposed here, it wouldn’t have made a difference.
In general, your comments strike me as reflecting a very naive understanding of how anything works. Legal responsibilities are simply not the only thing that matters. This entire episode was about 95% a PR battle, which the board lost and Altman won. If it's not obvious to you that the board's legal rights and responsibilities had essentially zero to do with the outcome here, then I really don't know how to help you.
“Naive” is thinking that taking a poll of the public or employees (which is the only reasonable action I can think of that looks like “arguing their case”) would have had any positive effect on the outcome. This is simply… not how decisions are made. Even shareholder vote calls (for companies that have them) are coordinated, with the outcomes for consequential decisions well understood before voting happens. The optics for Open.ai certainly should have been better, but there is no version of this story where the board doesn’t do whatever they hell they want, and no version where “making the case” doesn’t result in even more chaos.
Corporations are not a democracy. They do not “owe” the public any information that they aren’t compelled to disclose. And they certainly don’t “argue their case” to some nebulous forum comprised of either the public or employees.
From reading your comment I think this might actually be a simple language misunderstanding.
You say:
> taking a poll of the public or employees
And then:
> which is the only reasonable action I can think of that looks like “arguing their case”
But that is a total non sequitur. "Taking a poll" has no relation whatsoever to "arguing their case". So I think you might not know what "arguing their case" means.
So I'll just plainly say what I think they should have done, without any jargon. I think they should have, after firing him, released a statement targeted at employees but also with a public audience in mind, something like this:
"We have simply lost faith in Mr. Altman to faithfully execute his duties as the executive of OpenAI's non-profit charter. We believe he has been acting in the interests of his own, which are not aligned with our mission. We have tried to redirect his efforts over a period of time, without success, and now are taking the only recourse that we believe is available to us to fulfill our duty to the organization. We understand that many of you will find this jarring and unsettling, but we hope you will continue to believe in the mission of OpenAI and stick with us through this trying and uncertain time, so that we can come out of it stronger and better aligned than ever."
Then anyone who quit would at least need to rationalize - to themselves, and to their social circles - why they chose not to take that to hear. Maybe for many / most / all of them, just "money" or a personal loyalty to Altman would have still won the day, but it certainly wouldn't have been as easy as it was to abandon a board that was seen as confusing and shambolic and refusing to explain itself.
That statement above is the part that would be "arguing their case". Just making the statement; the statement is the argument for that they did. Note that it doesn't include any sort of polling of anyone, or any different use of their legal rights or responsibilities. It's "just" PR, but that actually matters a lot.
>there is no version of this story where the board doesn’t do whatever they hell they want, and no version where “making the case” doesn’t result in even more chaos.
The failure to make their case is PRECISELY why the board was ultimately unable to do what the hell they wanted: remove Sam Altman. As it turned out, his presence was important enough to the employees that the usual corporate playbook of "do whatever the hell we want and only disclose what is legally required" backfired spectacularly.
If your thesis was correct, Sam would not be there right now.
