A quick summary of the past three days of chaos
Comment Microsoft may emerge as the real winner from all the shenanigans at OpenAI if the Azure titan can bag the lab’s co-founder and now-ex CEO Sam Altman. Seeing him back at the helm of the lab, with some changes made, would also please Microsoft.
There’s no guarantee he’ll join the Windows giant or go back to OpenAI. Meanwhile, the vast majority of OpenAI’s staff – by now reportedly 700 of 770 – have pledged they’ll quit and possibly join Altman at Microsoft unless he is reinstated at OpenAI and the board resigns. Nothing so far has been officially decided or explained. This saga twists and turns every other hour.Timeline
On Friday, the tech industry was stunned to learn the OpenAI board of directors had turned on Altman. After sacking him, the panel issued a damning statement accusing the now-former chief exec of not being “consistently candid in his communications” with the board.
It’s not clear what the upstart’s leader did exactly to be kicked out so abruptly, though it’s clear his fellow board directors had lost confidence in him and wanted him out. There are many theories being thrown around, and a leading one right now is that there were concerns among at least some board members that OpenAI was commercializing its content-generating neural networks at too fast a rate without sufficiently addressing the risks. Friction there led to Altman’s ousting, we can well imagine.Another rival?
Hours after Altman was chopped, OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman – who had also been removed from his board chairman role on Friday – announced his resignation, and a handful of senior engineers followed suit. Rumors that the group would go off and form their own shiny new AI venture immediately began swirling around. That would have been an obvious next move for Altman – a well-known figure in Silicon Valley who has more than a decade of experience in the startup world, and someone who would have no problem raising money and attracting talent.
(OpenAI has already had a split of sorts, with ex-staff leaving a while ago to form safety-conscious AI startup Anthropic. It’s claimed OpenAI’s board had hoped Anthropic would be interested in a merger, with the latter’s CEO Dario Amodei taking over the biz following Altman’s departure.)
OpenAI’s investors knew Altman’s removal was going to be sub-optimal for them and for the org. Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Tiger Global Management are among those shareholders trying to bring the top boss back to OpenAI, and are still reportedly keen for him to return.He could just go back
There was and still is talk of Altman possibly coming back to OpenAI as long as certain conditions are met – such as changes to the organization’s governance, presumably to stop another fiasco like this happening. OpenAI deliberately has a small board, and it was supposed to have the ability to quickly and easily take significant steps, like what we saw at the end of last week, to curb the lab if (say) its AI systems got out of hand.
