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.

Murati elaborated: Altman was an incredibly anxious person. And when he felt anxious, he had dumb ideas, particularly when enabled by Brockman. Altman’s anxiety also fed into toxic behaviors that always followed the same playbook: To anyone resisting his decisions, he would say whatever he thought they wanted to hear to win their support; then, when he lost patience waiting and believed they would continue to go against him, he would undermine their credibility until they got out of the way. It was subtle but pervasive, and had most recently manifested with the issue between Sutskever and Pachocki. It had been extremely damaging and had left Sutskever very upset, she said.

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.

Toner responded: The board would focus on the things that it could actually change—not Sam’s personality or behavior but instituting better governance processes and structures to keep him in check.

This aligned with what Murati had been trying to do within the company. She had just one more word of caution for Toner. “Make sure your information isn’t just coming from Sam,” she said.

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.