You don’t need EA or AI safety motives to explain the event. Later reporting suggested that it was caused by (1) Sutskever and other OpenAI executives telling the board that Altman often lied (WSJ, WaPo, New Yorker) and (2) Altman dishonestly attempting to remove Toner from the board (over the obvious pretext that her coauthored paper Decoding Intentions was too critical of OpenAI, plus allegedly falsely telling board members that McCauley wanted Toner removed) (NYT, New Yorker). As far as I know, there’s ~no evidence that EA or AI safety motives were relevant, besides the composition of the board. This isn’t much of a mystery.
You don’t need EA or AI safety motives to explain the event. Later reporting suggested that it was caused by (1) Sutskever and other OpenAI executives telling the board that Altman often lied (WSJ, WaPo, New Yorker) and (2) Altman dishonestly attempting to remove Toner from the board (over the obvious pretext that her coauthored paper Decoding Intentions was too critical of OpenAI, plus allegedly falsely telling board members that McCauley wanted Toner removed) (NYT, New Yorker). As far as I know, there’s ~no evidence that EA or AI safety motives were relevant, besides the composition of the board. This isn’t much of a mystery.
See generally gwern’s comments.