And shareholders

He couldn’t have imagined the drama of this week, with four directors on OpenAI’s nonprofit board unexpectedly firing him as CEO and removing the company’s president as chairman of the board. But the bylaws Altman and his cofounders initially established and a restructuring in 2019 that opened the door to billions of dollars in investment from Microsoft gave a handful of people with no financial stake in the company the power to upend the project on a whim.

https://www.wired.com/story/openai-bizarre-structure-4-people-the-power-to-fire-sam-altman/

Oh! Turns out I was wrong... "a handful of people with no financial stake in the company" doesn't sound like shareholders, and yet they could change the direction of the company at will. And just so we're clear, whether it's four faceless ghouls or Sam Altman, 1 or 4, the fact that the company is beholden to so few people, who themselves are not democratically elected, nor necessarily law experts, nor necessarily have any history being police officers... their AI is what decides whether or not to hold a police officer accountable for his misdeeds? Hard. Pass.

Oh, and lest we forget Microsoft is invested in OpenAI, and OpenAI has a quasi-profit-driven structure. Those 4 board directors aren't even my biggest concern with that arrangement.

(2/2)