OpenAI - the lack of "Why?"

Why is no one asking the Why question about OpenAI board's decision?

Before the Q* leak surfaced, there was a huge missing piece for me in the OpenAI debacle: what exactly were the board members of OpenAI trying to achieve by removing Sam Altman the way they did it?

Noticeably, the lack of answer to that question did not preclude most observers from declaring that the board just blew it. The chorus, of course, just got louder when Sam was re-installed at the helm. Yet the argument that the board members were just incompetent idiots seems like a lazy, easy answer; rarely it is the right one when it comes to making and evaluating complex decisions. The individuals on that board must have somehow arrived at a shared(!) view that removing Sam Altman immediately is the best or the only way to solve some huge problem or avoid a huge crisis.

What could that have been? We still don't quite know yet. Without that knowledge we really can't evaluate how bad the decision was, and - more importantly - were there better alternatives. Just imagine, for a moment, that the board's real goal was to blow up the company from the inside to slow down AI advancement. If that was the goal - well, they almost succeeded. Not only that, but the gamble they took might have been the only viable option at the time, however slim the chances for success.

When I help people evaluate decisions - others' or their own - I frequently encounter this tendency to label a decision "good" or "bad" based solely on observable "objective" results. An example would be something like "I should not have left a big corporation to pursue my startup dream, because now I am struggling to make ends meet. My decision was a mistake". My questions at that point would be: do you remember why you made that decision? What was the worldview that informed it? What were you trying to achieve?

Often, once we get into the details, the decision turns out to be a fairly good one - it just didn't work out. Maybe the economy slumped. Maybe the person simply didn't follow one good decision with more good decisions that were required to succeed. Maybe they fell ill and didn't have enough energy when it was necessary to push through. None of these make the initial decision a bad one.

Becoming a better decision-maker in complex personal and professional matters requires evaluating your own and other people's decisions - it is an essential part of training. Well, a good evaluation of a decision does not start at the end. Looking solely at the outcome is meaningless.

The "Why I did it" is almost always more important than "What I did".