When OpenAI’s board ousted CEO Sam Altman over a reported disagreement, claiming he was “not always candid,” many onlookers were scratching their heads. How could something like this happen at one of Silicon Valley’s most vibrant startups? The surprise firing highlighted the bizarre corporate structure at the $86 billion startup, with the nonprofit controlling the for-profit subsidiary. This structure has drawn criticism from numerous tech characters, including Box CEO Aaron Levie. By tweets On stage, Levie doubled down on OpenAI’s unorthodox structure Fortune‘s Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco on Monday.
“If you just look at the ratio between the amount of drama and the amount of takeaways, the ratio is wrong,” Levie said on stage. “The most important conclusion is: make sure you don’t have strange company structures. It never ends well.”
At the heart of the dispute at OpenAI was a reported clash of perspectives on the trajectory of artificial intelligence growth. On one side was the effective altruistic faction, which included former board member Helen Toner, which worries about a doomsday scenario in which AI could destroy the world. On the other hand, there are enthusiasts of effective accelerationism (e/acc), who believe in the potential of AI to positively transform our world and advocate for accelerated development. Internally it wasn’t so black and white, but that seems to be the essence of the dispute for the layman.
Levie highlighted these two growing factions within Silicon Valley, and while he leans more toward acceleration, he said his biggest lesson from the philosophies is that we need to “land the plane as an ecosystem on this issue as quickly as possible.” There are “tens of thousands of products” that rely on OpenAI, creating a community of companies whose own fortunes have become deeply intertwined in OpenAI’s success.
Take Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, who earlier Monday on Brainstorm AI described how his team had to reach out to “the highest levels of contacts” they had at Microsoft to ensure they wouldn’t experience a service disruption as a result. to get. of the boardroom drama.
Levie highlights this dependency as a major reason why there was so much drama, with so many figures rallying behind the success of OpenAI and Altman.
“It wasn’t your classic kind of leadership struggle or dynamic,” Levie said.