The thing with Linda is that while she's theoretically the boss, and Musk reports to her as CTO/CPO everybody knows that Musk is the boss and she's there to... sell ads? Actually I don't know what she's supposed to do, but it doesn't matter, she's certainly not allowed to touch either the product or the technology and Musk can fire her at any point as owner/chairman.
This, OTOH is a just a simple straightforward C-Suite. Sam is the boss, and he hired two reports to handle areas where they have expertise. This might be the simplest corporate thing OpenAI has ever done, lol.
It's a pretty reasonable question for both of them. Perhaps more for the CFO, given what we know of Altman's, er, lack of candour with the board where money is concerned. But maybe given the "Her" debate it applies to both of them, in different ways.
Is this a company where the executives can really be more than rubber stamps?
Sure. Sam and other executives probably took an hour of their time to decide what they would write in the blog post to appease the critics (which is par for the course for any public-facing company as widely known as OpenAI †), and then maybe another hour meeting with their lawyers to prepare in case of a suit, three weeks ago.
But in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it's in their top 15 priorities. People here talk as if the Her thing was almost an existential threat to Altman's leadership.
I don't think losing sleep is a requirement. However, you know that the next time an ad is going to be release, it will be in people's minds of what backlash might happen from this before it gets green lit. At least, one would hope that would be the take away.
