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When you have a board who is out of their depth and no real owner, you are going to have problems.
You’re right. It’s instead how you run a nonprofit built to further the the vision of a once-in-a-generation ML researcher, without having it stolen out from under you.
Ilya and the board are entitled to their opinions and to act on them, but the whole process strikes me as extremely unprofessional, and something out of the Game of Thrones!
Nothing about the story is unprofessional. Now, there's different process appropriate depending on the actual reason termination was being discussed, and we don't know enough to say whether this was appropriate fiven the cause, but its definitely in the scope of what is reasonable and orofessional for dismissing them.
I would assume that “something out of Game of Thrones” were the table stakes, given the money and people involved.
It seems incredibly risky to give Microsoft’s lawyers $10bn worth of reason to take a close look at a novel corporate structure and surrounding case law. Why not cut a deal for a spin out?
Unless their contract had a specific stipulation that Altman shake hands on a stage with Nadella every three months or something, this seems largely irrelevant. So long as OpenAI continues to honor the deal terms about technology access, I don’t see how they’re exposed.
> It seems incredibly risky to give Microsoft’s lawyers $10bn worth of reason to take a close look at a novel corporate structure and surrounding case law.

Presumably, Microsoft’s lawyers did that before they bought into the novel corporate structure. I mean, its Microsoft, not Elon Musk. Due diligence is a thing.

So they’ll be that much faster filing whatever they’re going to file tomorrow morning.

There’s also the realpolitik of the situation - MSFT owns and controls the compute, in the worst case they can take their ball and go play somewhere else

Do you imagine executives/board member dismissals have some elaborate ceremony?
Typically they try to work out something behind the scenes before making a public announcement. And usually major stakeholders like Microsoft are brought into the decision-making process.

The announcement affected Microsoft's stock price today.