I can’t imagine an organization where this wouldn’t have come up on some roadmap or prioritization meeting, etc. How could leadership not know what the org is working on?! They’re not that big.

Board is not exactly leadership. They meet infrequently and get updates directly from management, they don't go around asking employees what they're working on

True. So the CTO knew what was happening, wasn’t happy, and then coordinated with the board, is that what appears to have happened?

CTO who is now acting CEO.

Not making any accusations but that was an odd decision given that there is an OpenAI COO.

More supervision than leadership...

Surely Ilya Sutskever must have known what was being worked on as Chief Scientist?

They do typically have views into strategic plans, roadmaps and product plans.

Going into detail in a talk and discussing AGI may have provided crucial context that wasn't obvious from a PowerPoint bullet point, which is all the board may have seen earlier.

I can't imagine an organization that would fire their celebrity CEO like this either. So maybe that's how we arrived here.