On Culture and Governance, or: Comparing Open AI and eCash
Recently there’s been a lot of speculation about what happened behind the scenes at Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT. Here’s what we know. This past Friday, the 4 person board of directors fired the CEO, Sam Altman, and was immediately met with enormous backlash from both company insiders and outsiders alike. While no details have emerged as to exactly what led to the firing, chances are that the members of the board didn’t share Altman’s vision as to what was best for Open AI.
I bring all this up because I couldn’t help seeing some parallels between Open AI and the eCash project. For example, in the aftermath of Altman’s firing, many Open AI employees took to Twitter over the weekend to signal that they would resign if the firing wasn’t reversed. It got me thinking about the intentions of these employees, and while I am in no way suggesting this is actually the case,
I could imagine a scenario where employees with thousands of stock options might favor a CEO whose objective was to maximize profits over a board whose goal might be to maximize safety.
It reminded me of something I’ve been thinking about with regard to $XEC . For example, what if all the $XEC stakeholders decided to vote for increasing the staking rewards so that instead of only receiving 10% of the block reward, it became much higher? Another way of putting it is how do we ensure that the eCash stakeholders do what’s in the best interest of the project, rather than what they think is in the best interest of their individual wallets?
To me, the answer comes down to culture. Culture as in what do the stakeholders of these projects ultimately want? In the case of Open AI, is the goal to make as much money as possible, or to safely create artificial general intelligence that benefits all of mankind?
