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How OpenAI so royally screwed up the Sam Altman firing | CNN Business

By Thomas A. Smith
New York CNN    

OpenAI s overseers worried that the company was making the technological equivalent of a nuclear bomb, and its caretaker, Sam Altman, was moving so fast that he risked a global catastrophe.

So the board fired him. That may ultimately have been the logical solution.

But the manner in which Altman was fired abruptly, opaquely and without warning to some of OpenAI s largest stakeholders and partners defied logic. And it risked inflicting more damage than if the board took no such action at all.

A company s board of directors has an obligation, first and foremost, to its shareholders. OpenAI s most important shareholder is Microsoft, the company that gave Altman & Co. $13 billion to help Bing, Office, Windows and Azure leapfrog Google and stay ahead of Amazon, IBM and other AI wannabes.

Yet Microsoft was not informed of Altman s firing until just before the public announcement, according to CNN contributor Kara Swisher, who spoke to sources knowledgeable about the board s ousting of its CEO. Microsoft s stock sank after Altman was let go.

via www.cnn.com

What a mess. Nvidia is up about one percent so far today, however, I note with joy.