[Also informed by FTX]

Epistemic status: some of these assertions are lightly held, and it's possible they may not apply to specific situations that well. Analyzing someone's motives can be challenging, and I have zero inside knowledge of dynamics at OpenAI.

1. Money, power, fame, etc. are powerful motivating -- and often corrupting -- factors in human motivation.
2. A model that depends on a single person (or a small group of interconnected people) being able to resist the allure of money, power, fame, etc. because of their virtue, value alignment, etc. rests on awfully shaky ground. I get the sense that EAs are, as a whole, too ready to assume that other EAs have low susceptibility to corruption from these sorts of influences.
3. (Based on a low n) Assessment of a person's ability to resist money, power, fame, etc. may be significantly more difficult when that person's track record is fairly limited. In the non-EA world, it would be seen as crazy to give someone who is ~30 years old a role that could have a major impact on humanity's future. In those worlds, people are -- at least in theory -- only given roles of extraordinary trust after decades of proving themselves capable of having resisted corrupting influences to some degree. Although personality/identity change continues throughout the life course, my (simplified) understanding is that significant changes in the 20s are not uncommon.^[1]
4. At the risk of quoting the Bible in the EA Forum: "Do not be misled: 'Bad company corrupts good character.'" Or as most parents of teenagers know: if your kid starts closely hanging out with people who are bad news, odds are that your kid's behavior will start changing rather than your kid having a salutary effect on the others. Microsoft may not be the evil empire anymore, but it is still a profit-seeking publicly-held corporation, and we all know what types of incentives such corporations have. I obviously can't speak for each OpenAI employee who assisted Altman in overthrowing the board, but it seems likely that those employees' personal interests would align with working with an organization that is "winning" the AI race and becomes exceptionally profitable/powerful/famous ASAP.

What to do about these truths is a more difficult question. There are probably some low-hanging fruit: when making a decision, model what would happen if a core person or interconnected core group goes rouge. Incorporate the risk of empowering people who may fall prey to the allure of money, fame, power, etc. into one's assessments. But strongly mitigating against the allure of money, power, fame, etc. when trying to get stuff done -- especially when trying to get stuff done quickly -- is rather difficult.

1. ^{^}

   This is not a 41-year old asserting that we shouldn't trust anyone under thirty! I am, however, asserting that we have much less data about their resilience to the allure of money, power, fame, etc. than we have for a 50-year old who has occupied positions over a period of time with an increasing exposure to that allure. Risk models should reflect that increased uncertainty.