... Blake failed to appreciate the true balance of power and the deep cultural influence of the Athlete’s Advisory Council. He felt that he had his ducks in order, with a board mandate and plan approval to carry out the change that he - and many others - believed was essential. In a corporate setting this may have been relatively straightforward, given the generally clear scorecards of financial and organizational performance. Then again, it may very well have been just as difficult and ultimately unsuccessful. Why? Because whether it’s a powerful group of employees, retirees, restive shareholders, or even customers, a failure to assess the culture and the readiness for change among different interest groups can be lethal.

Huang eschewed drama and led by example, driving himself hard, refraining from gossip, and carefully apportioning credit for good work. If a product was going to be late or if LSI couldn’t deliver on some promised function, Huang would immediately provide a detailed description of what had gone wrong, who was responsible, and what he was doing to fix it.

“When he said he was going to do something, there was a reasonable likelihood that he would actually do it, y’know?” Malachowsky said. Malachowsky struggled to think of other Silicon Valley product managers who fit that description.

If Huang had a flaw, it was that he embraced candor in the extreme, sometimes crossing into the territory of insult. The bluntness was part of his charm, of course, but it could leave people’s feelings hurt. He didn’t have much patience for people who disagreed with him, and he also seemed genuinely surprised that there were people working in his industry who didn’t want to spend fourteen hours a day fiddling with the circuit simulator. Of course, for quarrelsome workaholics like Priem and Malachowsky, these traits were only further evidence of Jensen’s managerial fitness.

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.