“Reid Hoffman Was Privately Unhappy about Leaving OpenAI’s Board”, 2023-11-19 (; backlinks):
LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman [he also helped found OpenAI itself] was privately unhappy about being asked to leave the OpenAI board in the spring by then-CEO Sam Altman, who was adamant about the departure, people familiar with the situation said.
Hoffman announced he was voluntarily stepping down as an OpenAI director in March to avoid what he said was an appearance of a conflict since he was involved in a competing AI company. He had co-founded Inflection AI, which makes a chatbot called Pi.
But Hoffman downplayed his role at Inflection, telling people it was largely created to help its co-founder, Mustafa Suleyman, one of the people said.
If Hoffman had stayed on the board, he may have had enough stature to possibly stop the move to oust Altman as CEO on Friday. But the diminished number of directors, which went 9 → 6 in the months after Hoffman left, ended up putting Altman at a disadvantage. According to several people familiar with the matter, Altman had been trying to add people to OpenAI’s board in recent months.
[The Semafor journalist argues that Hoffman was a Altman loyalist and removing him was a mistake. However, in addition to co-founding OA, Hoffman funds HAI and has much more nuanced beliefs about AI than some mindless commercialization. Hence, it is more likely that Altman was simply too unsure of Hoffman and that is why he was willing to anger Hoffman by demanding he quit over a rather minor conflict of interest no one cared about.]
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Reid Hoffman Was Privately Unhappy about Leaving OpenAI’s Board