ALBAWABA – Former OpenAI board member, Helen Toner, who was one of four people who made the decision to fire CEO Sam Altman, in November last year, has spoken out on The TED AI Show podcast regarding the actual reasons and events that led to the decision.
Microsoft stock surges as former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman takes charge of AI innovation divisionAltman was abruptly fired by the board of directors of OpenAI earlier in November last year, citing the fact that the board had carried out an extensive review procedure and that Altman had not been consistently truthful in his contacts with the board, which hindered the board's ability to carry out its legal obligations, before he was rehired again with the announcement of new board.
Toner said that Sam had, for a number of years, made it extremely hard for the board to effectively carry out its duties by concealing facts, misrepresenting events that were taking on at the firm, and in some instances, plain lying to the board, which she notes to be a non-profit board that was specifically established to ensure that the company's public good objective took precedence above earnings.
She cited the example of how the board was actually unaware of OpenAI's November 2022 release of ChatGPT and only learned about it via Twitter, Toner also said that Altman kept his ownership of the OpenAI startup fund a secret from the board.
“For any individual case, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous-sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal, or misinterpreted, or whatever,” she said, adding that “the end effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion that we just couldn’t believe things that Sam was telling us, and that’s just a completely unworkable place to be in as a board.”
She asserts that there were only two alternatives offered to the staff: either abandon the board to bring Altman back, or watch OpenAI fail, and as no one wanted to see the company break down, they backed the alternative. She also claims that after seeing Altman exact revenge on others, a lot of people were afraid to oppose him.
