After his abrupt dismissal on Friday, Sam Altman has resumed his role as CEO of OpenAI. This event sparked a response from numerous OpenAI staff, with co-founder and board member Ilya Sutskever spearheading a letter of demands that remaining board members resign, threatening to resign themselves should their plea not be met. On Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that Altman and others from OpenAI would be uniting to form a "new advanced AI research team."
Early Wednesday morning, OpenAI tweeted that Sam Altman will reprise his role as CEO of the Microsoft-backed startup, following immense pressure from employees and investors on the board that had ousted him less than a week before. Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join the board, with Taylor taking the chair position. Adam D'Angelo, co-founder and CEO of question-and-answer startup Quora, will remain on the board. Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who were all involved in the effort to push Altman out, have been removed as board members. However, Sutskever retracted his support afterwards and is still at OpenAI as of Wednesday.
OpenAI expressed gratitude for the public's patience in their X post Wednesday at 1 a.m. ET.Their statement comes one day after hundreds of employees, including Sutskever, signed a letter demanding that the board resign and Altman be reinstated. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella voiced his support of Altman and Greg Brockman in an X post, and the two will be forming a new AI lab at Microsoft. It was then revealed late Sunday that OpenAI had hired former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as Altman's interim replacement, but this has since been reversed.
Nadella commented on the changes OpenAI has made to their board in an X post, writing that it is "a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance." Altman expressed his enthusiasm to return to OpenAI in a post of his own on X. Thrive Capital also issued a statement, asserting that "Sam and Greg possess a profound commitment to the company's integrity, and an unmatched ability to inspire and lead."
Late Saturday night, Altman shared a post expressing his appreciation for the OpenAI team and Brockman; who stepped down as Chairman as Altman was let go, re-shared the post with a heart symbol. Many other members of OpenAI followed suit. OpenAI, which had recently been rumored to sell shares to investors for an estimated $86 billion, had become a widely discussed startup after releasing its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. The innovative technology allowed users to communicate using simple text queries and to obtain smart responses that could fuel further conversations.
Altman, who had been leading the company since 2019 and was a major figure in AI research and product development, was at the helm of a high-flying venture. But unlike other Silicon Valley organizations, OpenAI wasn't structured like a conventional corporation with major chunks of equity belonging to its founders. It was created in 2015 as part of a non-profit, governed by a board and overseeing all activities related to the company, as per the board's Friday post. Members of the founding team included Sutskever and Brockman, with original investors such as Altman himself, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (who allegedly contributed $1 billion to the project).
According to an X post, Brockman made his return to OpenAI in early Wednesday with the intention of coding. In response to the board's decision to dismiss Altman, investors and founders of the tech world heavily criticized the move, being reminded of Apple's action to fire Steve Jobs in 1985. Jobs successfully returned to the company in 1997 and actively participated in the creation of the iPhone, allowing Apple to become the most valuable corporation in the U.S.
Several of these prominent figures described Altman as a great founder and a "hero of mine", including Eric Schmidt, Brian Chesky and Vinod Khosla. Additionally, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, whose company has invested enormous amounts in OpenAI and shares a close partnership, was reportedly taken aback by the announcement.
OpenAI board member Shear shared a post on X in the early Wednesday morning in which he noted that the board's decision was "the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved".
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