I don’t think the board’s side considered it a referendum. Just because the inappropriate behaviour was about safety doesn’t mean that a high integrity board member who is not safety focused shouldn’t fire them!
It doesn’t matter what you think they should have done, the fact is, Murati and Sutskever defected to Altman’s side after initially backing his firing, almost certainly because the consensus discourse quickly became focused on EA and AI safety and not the object-level accusations of inappropriate behavior.
I don’t think the board’s side considered it a referendum. Just because the inappropriate behaviour was about safety doesn’t mean that a high integrity board member who is not safety focused shouldn’t fire them!
It doesn’t matter what you think they should have done, the fact is, Murati and Sutskever defected to Altman’s side after initially backing his firing, almost certainly because the consensus discourse quickly became focused on EA and AI safety and not the object-level accusations of inappropriate behavior.