Sam Altman was the CEO and Greg Brockman was the chairman of the board at OpenAI.org, the parent company that is listed as a not-for-profit organization in the US u/s 501(C)(3). On 17 Nov 2023 both of them were fired by the Independent Directors of the board. This post talks about the 4-day drama that ensued at the back of these events, focusing on the role of Independent Directors. (Try here for a related earlier post.) One year ago the company launched the ChatGPT, the Large Language Model, that rose to prominence with its Generative AI capabilities (“GPT” or Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and human-like response and interactive interface (“Chat”). At launch ChatGPT was based on based on GPT-3.5 series. The launch took the internet by storm as Microsoft unveiled its commercial partnership with the firm, and its global marketing machine geared into action. To accommodate for this new profit-making "partnership" endeavor, the firm came up with anothe...