The drama around OpenAI, its board, and Sam Altman has been a fascinating story that raises a number of ethical leadership issues. What are the responsibilities that OpenAI's board, Sam Altman, and Microsoft held during these quickly moving events? Whose interests should have held priority during this saga and why? We still don't know in what way Altman was not straightforward with his board. We do know nonprofit boards-and OpenAI is, by design, governed by a nonprofit board-have a special duty to ensure the organization is meeting its mission. In an interview with the podcast Hard Fork days before he was fired, when asked to define artificial general intelligence, Altman said it's a "Ridiculous and meaningless term," and redefined it as "Really smart AI." Perhaps his board felt the term and its definition was more important. One issue may be that OpenAI's mission statement reads more like a vision statement which can be more aspirational and forward-looking than a corporation's mission statement, which usually captures the organization's purpose. The real issue here is not whether it is a vision or mission statement: The ethical issue is that the board is obligated to take actions that ensure it is fulfilled. If a cautious approach is what OpenAI's mission implies, then it's a worthy goal to pursue, even if it goes against the traditional approach of a more typically structured startup. The board also has a duty to actively participate in oversight of the organization's activities and manage its assets prudently. We also know more now about the board's dysfunction, including the fact that the tension has existed for much of the past year and that a disagreement broke out over a paper a board member wrote that seemed critical of the company's approach to AI safety and complimentary of a competitor. While the board member defended her paper as an act of academic freedom, writing papers about the company while sitting on its board can be considered a conflict of interest as it violates the duty of loyalty. If she felt strongly about writing the paper, that was the moment to resign from the board. As the sitting CEO of OpenAI, the interests Altman needed to keep front and center were those of OpenAI. Given what's been reported about the additional business interests he was pursuing in the form of starting two other companies, there is some evidence he did not make OpenAI his absolute priority. Whether this is at the heart of the communication issues he had with the board remains to be seen, but it's enough to know he was on the road working to get these organizations started. Even by his own admission, Altman did not stay close enough to his own board to prevent the organizational meltdown that has now occurred on his watch. Elon Musk, an early investor and board member at OpenAI, believes he can shepherd the interests of Tesla, SpaceX and its Starlink network, The Boring Company, and X all at the same time. Finding a balance between those activities is part of the work of corporate leaders and perhaps the board felt that Altman failed to find such a balance in the months leading up to his firing. Microsoft seems to be the most clear-eyed about the interests it must protect: Microsoft's! By hiring Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, offering to hire more OpenAI staff, and still planning to collaborate with OpenAI, Satya Nadella hedged his bets. OpenAI employees may not like the board's dramatic retort that allowing the company to be destroyed would be consistent with the mission-but those board members saw it that way. The board of OpenAI was created, by design, to remove profit interests from the equation.
This Cyber News was published on fortune.com. Publication date: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 23:19:27 +0000