Nicola Jones in Nature:
OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, California, was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization. In 2019, it shifted to an unusual capped-profit model, with a board explicitly not accountable to shareholders or investors, including Microsoft. In the background of Altman’s firing “is very clearly a conflict between the non-profit and the capped-profit; a conflict of culture and aims”, says Jathan Sadowski, a social scientist of technology at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia.
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and a member of the board that ousted Altman, this July shifted his focus to ‘superalignment’, a four-year project attempting to ensure that future superintelligences work for the good of humanity.
It’s unclear whether Altman and Sutskever are at odds about speed of development: after the board fired Altman, Sutskever expressed regret about the impacts of his actions and was among the employees who signed the letter threatening to leave unless Altman returned.
More here.