While everyone was jerking themselves raw about this stuff a year ago, Tycho at Penny Arcade (yeah, remember them?) nailed it and it's been sitting in my head ever since:

Ultimately, the technology is not my concern. It is that there's another Industrial Revolution happening, right now, you can play with it like a toy, and it will be very surprising to me if it results in a greater bargaining position for the worker. That's just not how it goes.

Some portion of the conversation always has the sting of betrayal in it. But you like computer stuff! Yeah, I like computer stuff. Except we aren't talking about computer stuff. We're talking about people stuff. People are messy. I work with a lot of creative people, and I have also had the pleasure - firmly installed in quotes - of working with the kind of people who call those people "creatives." We were at a meeting once where the person who will be advocating and using these technologies in your organization told us they hated creatives to our face. These technologies will displace workers and slash pay. That's… I mean, that's it.

https://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2022/12/26/sockrates

From the start of this AI boom, I've been saying, again and again, that regardless of the technology itself, the truly despicable thing about this are the people. Take all your idealistic futurist nonsense and "passion" for pushing the limits of technology and blow it out your ass, because this technology has one primary use case that was obvious from the word go, and every single one of these fuckers knew what that was when they started making it. For years they have worked to make a tool for corporations to steal the work from the working class, weaponize it against them, and enrich themselves in the process. They can all get fucked.

I think people siding with him because they heard fuck all from the actual board.

If the board came out strong with a "our mission isn't to productize chat bots, but to research and develop AGI in an open, ethical, transparent way. Altman, as CEO, was undermining our mission by putting the emphasis on profit. These decisions by Sam weren't communicated to the board. We the board agreed that, while this may be surprising and disappointing to some, the best long term course of action is to part ways with Sam. We wish him all the best in his future endeavors and we look forward to fulfilling our mission in a responsible, open way".

"Pathetic" is actually a really good word to use in this situation, because its root is the greek word "pathos", which is known today as a type of persuasion where you rely on emotion.

People only look at the headline. They see a person fired without a specified reason. It seems like it should be easy to see something happening is unfair.

But this sort of thing is rarely that simple.