As mentioned by another person in this thread [0], it is likely that it was Ilya's work that was getting replicated by another "secret" team, and the "different opinions on the same person" was Sam's opinions of Ilya. Perhaps Sam saw him as an unstable element and a single point of failure in the company, and wanted to make sure that OpenAI would be able to continue without Ilya?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=38357843