The continuous comings and goings of the soap opera OpenAI They are far from finished. After his abrupt dismissal, and despite the announcement of his arrival at Microsoft, Sam Altman would not give up and would be fighting to return as CEO of the Californian startup.
Altman’s most recent publications on X (Twitter) suggest that his arrival at the Redmond corporation is not yet confirmed. But he is also fighting alongside his main supporters to reverse his departure and regain control of OpenAI.
“The OpenAI leadership team, particularly Mira [Murati]Brad [Lightcap] and Jason [Kwon]”But really all of them have been doing an incredible job through this that will go down in the history books,” public Sam Altman, in what appears to be a direct reference to the bidding with the startup’s board of directors.
Likewise, the businessman commented: “We have more unity, commitment and focus than ever. We are all going to work together in one way or another, and I am very excited. One team, one mission.”
Sam Altman wants to regain his place at OpenAI
The possible return of Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI sounds less crazy than ever. Not only because it has the support of Microsoft, the main investor of the Californian startup, but because the employees themselves have demanded their return. The letter signed by virtually all of the company’s workers threatening to resign would have the board of directors against the wall.
The information circulating at this time is that both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, co-founder and former president of OpenAI, are negotiating for the departure of the board members. If two of the three members of the board of directors change their position, the way would be paved for the return of the fired CEO.
Let’s keep in mind that Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, was accused of being the main architect of Altman’s dismissal. Nevertheless, today he showed regret for his participation in the “riot” that led to the arrival of Emmett Shear as the new CEO. The remaining board members are Helen Tonerdirector of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology, Adam D’AngeloCEO of Quora and Tasha McCauleyCEO of GeoSim Systems.
As the power struggle between the parties deepens, Sam Altman once again noted that both his energies and those of Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, They are committed to making OpenAI successful. “My and Satya’s top priority remains ensuring that OpenAI thrives. We are committed to providing full continuity of operations to our partners and customers. The partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft makes this very feasible,” manifested.
The latest appears to be a direct message to the Californian startup’s clients. According to The Informationmore than 100 companies that depend on OpenAI services contacted Anthropic and Google Cloud to test the waters in case it is necessary to migrate your products to other platforms.
A philosophical conflict, the trigger of the crisis
Beyond the explanations provided by the board of directors after Sam Altman’s dismissal, little is really known about what happened behind the scenes of OpenAI. As reported Bloomberga philosophical conflict would have been the last straw that broke the camel’s back and led to the “expulsion” of the executive director.
As we already mentioned, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist of the startup, has been marked as the one who promoted Altman’s dismissal. The aforementioned would have been angered by several of the announcements that were made during the first OpenAI DevDay. Especially due to the introduction of GPTs that will allow users to create their own versions of ChatGPT.
Apparently, in recent months, tension had grown on the board of directors, who saw that OpenAI was expanding its for-profit arm at a frenetic pace and increasingly pursuing more commercial objectives. The fear of the members would have been that the development of AI became unsafe and had apocalyptic consequences. A position that Sam Altman and the developers would have considered extremely alarmist.
Sutskever would have been one of the most vocal about the hypothetical problems that rapid progress in the development of language models such as GPT-4 and GPT-5 would bring. In July, the chief scientist would have formed a new team within OpenAI to study “super intelligence” systems for the future. However, in October he reportedly found out that Sam Altman was trying to reduce his role and influence within the company.
In this way, Ilya Sutskever would have turned to other board members – with the exception of Altman and Brockman – to express his concern. The managers, who are linked to the movement of effective altruismtook a position in his favor and decided to remove the CEO from his duties.
Now that the scientist has reconsidered and aligned himself with Sam Altman, all eyes are on the possible resignation of the board of directors. If it does not materialize in the next few hours, all OpenAI employees will leave for Microsoft, which is waiting. If Toner, D’Angelo and McCauley don’t leave, experts say the startup could fall apart in less than a week. The only thing clear is that this novel still has several chapters left.