Note that the agreement is ‘in principle’. The board hasn’t yet given up its formal power (?)
I think a lot will still depend on the details of the negotiation: who will be on the new board and how safety-conscious will they be? The 4-person board had a strong bargaining chip: the potential collapse of OpenAI. They may have been able to leverage that (after all, it was a very credible threat after the firing: a costly signal!), or they may have been scared off by the reputational damage to EA & AI Safety of doing this. Altman & co. surely played that part well.
Pure speculation (maybe just cope): this was all part of the board’s plan. They knew they couldn’t fire Altman without huge backlash. They wanted a stronger negotiation position to install a safety-conscious board & get more grip on Altman. They had no other tools. Perhaps they were willing to let OpenAI collapse if negotiations failed. Toner certainly mentioned that ‘letting OpenAI collapse could be in line with the charter’. They expected to probably not maintain board seats themselves. They probably underestimated the amount of public backlash and may have made some tactical mistakes. Microsoft & OAI employees probably propped up Altman’s bargaining power quite a bit.
We’ll have to see what they ended up negotiating. I would be somewhat surprised if they didn’t drag anything out of those negotiations
This looks evermore unlikely. I guess I didn’t properly account for:
the counterfactual to OpenAI collapse was much of it moving to Microsoft, which the board would’ve wanted to prevent
the board apparently not producing any evidence of wrongdoing (I find this very surprising)
Nevertheless, I think speculating on internal politics can be a valuable exercise—being able to model the actions & power of strong bargainers (including bad faith ones) seems a valuable skill for EA.
Note that the agreement is ‘in principle’. The board hasn’t yet given up its formal power (?)
I think a lot will still depend on the details of the negotiation: who will be on the new board and how safety-conscious will they be? The 4-person board had a strong bargaining chip: the potential collapse of OpenAI. They may have been able to leverage that (after all, it was a very credible threat after the firing: a costly signal!), or they may have been scared off by the reputational damage to EA & AI Safety of doing this. Altman & co. surely played that part well.
Pure speculation (maybe just cope): this was all part of the board’s plan. They knew they couldn’t fire Altman without huge backlash. They wanted a stronger negotiation position to install a safety-conscious board & get more grip on Altman. They had no other tools. Perhaps they were willing to let OpenAI collapse if negotiations failed. Toner certainly mentioned that ‘letting OpenAI collapse could be in line with the charter’. They expected to probably not maintain board seats themselves. They probably underestimated the amount of public backlash and may have made some tactical mistakes. Microsoft & OAI employees probably propped up Altman’s bargaining power quite a bit.
We’ll have to see what they ended up negotiating. I would be somewhat surprised if they didn’t drag anything out of those negotiations
This looks evermore unlikely. I guess I didn’t properly account for:
the counterfactual to OpenAI collapse was much of it moving to Microsoft, which the board would’ve wanted to prevent
the board apparently not producing any evidence of wrongdoing (I find this very surprising)
Nevertheless, I think speculating on internal politics can be a valuable exercise—being able to model the actions & power of strong bargainers (including bad faith ones) seems a valuable skill for EA.