“OpenAI’s Employees Were given 2 Explanations for Why Sam Altman Was Fired. They’re Unconvinced and Furious”, 2023-11-20 ():
Ilya Sutskever is said to have offered two explanations he purportedly received from the board, according to one of the people familiar. One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project. [Superalignment?] The other was that Altman allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel. [possibly Jakub Pachocki or Sutskever, or the redteamer? This is sufficiently vague it could just refer to McCauley/Toner even.] An OpenAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment.
[This is a misleading and garbled paraphrase. What Sutskever said was that Altman constantly lied & manipulated, and that he couldn’t disclose the concrete examples for legal reasons (that he didn’t give the actual examples is confirmed by other reporting of the Sunday night discussion), and the two examples he gave were hypothetical examples similar to what Altman did.]
These explanations didn’t make sense to employees and were not received well, one of the people familiar said. Internally, the going theory is that this was a straightforward “coup” by the board, as it’s been called inside the company and out. Any reason being given by the board now holds little to no sway with staff, the person said.
…As the staff learned of Shear’s appointment, most took the news “extremely poorly”, one of the people said. It was yet another shock to employees, who had been on tenterhooks all weekend.
It was left to the chief scientist and cofounder Sutskever, who helped vote Altman out and did the actual firing of him over Google Meet, to deliver the news of Shear’s arrival. Sutskever appeared “subdued” during the meeting, one of the people said.