Why would they fire him because they are close to AGI? I get that they would go on full panic mode but firing the CEO wouldn't make sense since openai has AGI as an objective. The board wasn't exactly unaware of that.
You're right, I was imagining that he decided to hide the (full extent of?) the breakthrough to the board and do things covertly for some reason which could warrant firing him, but that's a pretty unlikely prior: why would he hide it from the board in the first place, given AGI is literally the board's mission? One reason might be that he wants to slow down this AGI progress until they've made more progress on safety and decided to hide it for that reason, and the board disagrees, but that sounds too much like a movie script to be real and very unlikely!
As I said, while I do have a mostly positive opinion of Sam Altman (I disagree with him on certain things but I and trust him a lot more than the vast majority of tech CEOs and politicians and I'd rather he be in the room when true superhuman intelligence is created than them), I hope this has nothing to do with AGI and it's "just" a personal scandal.
I don't really get "meme" culture but is that really how someone who believed their company is going to create AGI soon would behave? Turning the possibility of the success of their mission into a punchline?
