Remember that Greg Brockman is a co-founder of OpenAI, and like Sam Altman, he is a main driving force behind the scene. Now both are gone. There must be something really really seriously wrong.

Pretty sure Ilya Sutskever is the most valuable out of the group

Not gone, just out of power.

Which implies a coup. Four voting against two.

And it could be for any reason, even purely ethical like, “we don’t want to license this technology to better sell products to tweens”.

A coup wouldn't have him immediately fired. Instead he'd be placed in some advisory position while they transition in a new CEO. The immediate firing means scandal of some sort.

No. A weak coup would do exactly that. They have to isolate and alienate or they risk the ousted leader coming back or damaging the company.

How do these board members relate to Microsoft's holdings? Is Microsoft making a play here?

Honestly have no idea, but I'm sure a shift of control could cause this.

Brockman is off the board but not fired. Which is weird right? You'd think if he was involved in whatever the really bad thing is then he would be fired.

Could be something like Brockman pushing to investigate further, before having the vote, and the rest of the board not liking that.

Maybe Sam was the ring leader and he just went along with it?

It's probably simple reporting logic. Having a board member reporting to someone not on the board would be problematic.

No, that sort of thing isn't that weird, in relatively young companies. Think of when Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google. Larry Page and Sergei Brin reported to him as employees of Google, and he (as CEO of Google) reported to himself-and-also-them (as the board), and all of them (as the board) reported to Larry and Sergei (as majority owners).

For another example, imagine if OpenAI had never been a non-profit, and look at the board yesterday. You'd have had Ilya reporting to Sam (as employees), while Sam reports to Ilya (with Ilya as one member of the board, and probably a major stakeholder).

Now, when it gets hostile, those loops might get pretty weird. When things get hostile, you maybe modify reporting structures so the loops go away, so that people can maintain sane boundaries and still get work done (or gracefully exit, who knows).

Comma (geohot's self driving company) has a reporting loop because geohot demoted himself from CEO.

Twitter also has one, although that's hardly a functioning example.

There was no AI - it was just interns answering questions on the site known as ChatGPT

Took the “Do Things that Don't Scale” to the absolute limit

Turns out, there's no such thing as an LLM, it's all been a hustle with a low-paid army of writers in Kenya that Sama and gdb have been giving iv meth to.