Call me crazy, but I think Altman provoked the OpenAI non-profit board deliberately so that they would fire him and thus be cut free without legal penalty of that board’s non-profit limitations – along with whatever other contractual obligations he owed OpenAI (if any) – and be able to go straight to Microsoft, followed by whoever wanted to come along with him.
No more binding contractual obligations, no more “non-profit” limitations, the sky is now the only limit to personal and professional profit, and Altman can work directly for OpenAI’s biggest investor. Meanwhile that investor also gets to swallow all the good parts of OpenAI whole, without much more investment than it has already made, certainly not the full selling price OpenAI would command on the free market if it were for sale.
Win/win/win all around for everyone – except the OpenAI non-profit board and its stated goals.
The entire thing seems so perfectly engineered, including Altman taking it to Twitter as soon as the board fired him, and playing the rest of it out in the public eye, with Microsoft becoming his employer less than 48 hours later, that it’s hard to see it as anything else.
Even Satya Nadella (Microsoft CEO) was chiming in on Twitter through the weekend and before Altman was “officially” hired, which is rather odd to me – unless he already had inside knowledge that Altman’s post-directorate legal position with OpenAI would not be threatened by it.
I expect more information will be coming out in the next few weeks that will clear it up one way or another, but today I don’t believe for two seconds that any of this was a surprise to either Altman or Microsoft.