Expectations were high, my performance low. I knew the subject, but somehow couldn’t articulate my ideas coherently. Delegates didn’t hold back when it came to criticism and told me afterwards that my strategy was unclear, my content muddled and that I had given them no clear direction. It would have been so easy for me to have run my presentation by Louis in the days before I gave it - but I hadn’t wanted to subject myself to negative feedback. So I’d blundered on. I felt that I’d blown it and feared being sent back home.

Huang’s tirades inspired as much guilt as fear, and he often described, in detail, how in letting their customers down, Nvidia employees had let one another’s families down as well. (“I think I’m driven as much by guilt as anything else,” Huang told me.)

Nvidia conducted regular performance reviews of employees, and following the GeForce FX debacle, Clay feared that her next one would read RI: “Requires Improvement.” This, at Nvidia, was like being handed the Black Spot. For the GeForce FX, Clay had run four or five quality-control tests.

The problem was that everything Altman did was always so subtle. Each act viewed in isolation didn’t seem like that big a deal. It was only when viewing it all at once that patterns snapped into focus. The takeaway was not Look at this bad incident where Ilya feels like he’s been wronged, he stressed. This was just the latest instance of Altman’s patterns of abuse. There was also his treatment of Amodei, with whom Toner should speak to, Sutskever urged. And there were the circulating allegations from his sister. “It’s a different kind of a safety issue, if you see what I mean,” he said.

The independent directors laid out what they knew: This was not the first time that senior leaders had described Altman in this way. In total, the three of them had heard similar feedback from at least seven people within one to two levels of Altman, inclusive of Sutskever, Murati, and Amodei, who oversaw safety and nonsafety parts of the company. Several had described Altman’s behaviors as abuse and manipulation; most had highlighted his lack of honesty and their inability to trust what he said. Then there were the myriad other issues that the independent directors themselves had found, including the disempowerment of the nonprofit; Altman not disclosing his legal ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund; Altman neglecting to mention Microsoft’s DSB breach; Altman trying to force D’Angelo and now apparently Toner off the board.

There was, as Sutskever had mentioned, no particularly damning evidence, but an accumulation of many instances of Altman saying different things to different people and stoking intense frustration across management. The screenshots showed at least two more senior leaders, both nonsafety and outside of the seven that the directors were already aware of, noting Altman’s tendency to skirt and ignore processes, whether instituted for AI safety reasons or to smooth company operations. This included, the directors learned, Altman’s apparent attempt to skip DSB review for GPT-4 Turbo by misquoting the legal team to Murati.