OpenAI Fired Leadership Joins Microsoft, As Employees Revolt At The AI Company
OpenAI Fired Leadership Joins Microsoft, As Employees Revolt At The AI Company
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[Update] OpenAI's Sam Altman Reinstated As CEO; New Revelations Behind His Firing Emerge
[Update] OpenAI's Sam Altman Reinstated As CEO; New Revelations Behind His Firing Emerge
Days after his ouster, and social media frenzy, Sam Altman has been reinstated as CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, and Greg Brockman has also returned as president. The company also announced a new initial board with former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chair and Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Adam D'Angelo as directors. D'Angelo was part of the original board that had dismissed Altman.
"i'm looking forward to returning to openai," Altman said in part in a post on X late on Tuesday.
As part of the changes, the three other board members who moved to oust Altman -- Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and Ilya Sutskever -- are expected to leave those roles.
Sutskever was quick to repost the personal announcements on X from both Altman and Brockman about their returns to the company. Toner, on X, simply wrote “And now, we all get some sleep.”
The latest development also means that Emmett Shear, who the board had named interim CEO to replace Altman, will no longer serve in that role. In his own post on X, Shear said he was “deeply pleased” by the result, adding that the changes would maximize safety “alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved.”
CEO of Microsoft which has pledged billions of dollars to OpenAI, Satya Nadella welcomed the latest changes. "We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance," he wrote on X. $MSFT rose nearly 1% in premarket U.S trading.
Altman’s removal as CEO last Friday was reportedly tied to board concerns over how fast OpenAI was growing the business side of its operation, following the successful launch of ChatGPT.
Ahead of Altman's firing, several OpenAI staff researchers reportedly sent the board of directors a letter warning of a powerful artificial intelligence discovery that they said could threaten humanity.
Before his triumphant return late Tuesday, more than 700 employees had threatened to quit and join backer Microsoft in solidarity with their fired leader.
The letter was reportedly one factor among a longer list of grievances by the board that led to Altman’s firing.
Mira Murati mentioned the project, called Q*, to employees on Wednesday and said that a letter was sent to the board prior to this weekend's events.
OpenAI had reportedly made progress on Q* (pronounced Q-Star), which some internally believe could be a breakthrough in the startup's search for superintelligence, also known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters. OpenAI defines AGI as AI systems that are smarter than humans.
Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems, the person said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success.
Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development. Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do math -- where there is only one right answer -- implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. This could be applied to novel scientific research, for instance, AI researchers believe.
Unlike a calculator that can solve a limited number of operations, AGI can generalize, learn and comprehend.
In their letter to the board, researchers flagged AI’s prowess and potential danger, the sources said without specifying the exact safety concerns noted in the letter. There has long been discussion among computer scientists about the danger posed by superintelligent machines, for instance if they might decide that the destruction of humanity was in their interest.
Against this backdrop, Altman led efforts to make ChatGPT one of the fastest growing software applications in history and drew investment -- and computing resources -- necessary from Microsoft to get closer to superintelligence, or AGI.
In addition to announcing a slew of new tools in a demonstration this month, Altman last week teased at a gathering of world leaders in San Francisco that he believed AGI was in sight.
"Four times now in the history of OpenAI, the most recent time was just in the last couple weeks, I've gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is the professional honor of a lifetime," he said at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit.
OpenAI was originally founded as a non-profit and continues to describe its structure as being “a partnership between our original non-profit and a new capped profit arm.”
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Personnel fiasco at ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which played out on X, started publicly on Friday, when CEO Sam Altman was pushed out of his position by the company's board of directors, who said in a statement that it "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."
"i love you all," Altman wrote around midnight Saturday. "today was a weird experience in many ways. but one unexpected one is that it has been sorta like reading your own eulogy while you’re still alive. the outpouring of love is awesome. one takeaway: go tell your friends how great you think they are."
The board also said in the statement that the former CEO "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." OpenAI president Greg Brockman also resigned. And Mira Murati was briefly appointed as interim CEO.
Brockman wrote on X, "Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today. Let us first say thank you to all the incredible people who we have worked with at OpenAI, our customers, our investors, and all of those who have been reaching out. We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened. Here is what we know: Last night, Sam got a text from Ilya[Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist] asking to talk at noon Friday. Sam joined a Google Meet and the whole board, except Greg, was there. Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon. At 12:19pm, Greg got a text from Ilya asking for a quick call. At 12:23pm, Ilya sent a Google Meet link. Greg was told that he was being removed from the board (but was vital to the company and would retain his role) and that Sam had been fired. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post. As far as we know, the management team was made aware of this shortly after, other than Mira who found out the night prior. The outpouring of support has been really nice; thank you, but please don’t spend any time being concerned. We will be fine. Greater things coming soon."
Over the weekend, as backlash intensifies against the sudden firing, among tech leaders and employees at OpenAI, news broke that the board is reconsidering the decision.
The fired CEO reportedly gave the board a deadline of 5 p.m. PT Saturday to resign if he was to come back. The deadline was later extended to 5 p.m. PT Sunday after the board failed to resign but an agreement wasn't reached.
Altman later shared a photo of himself from OpenAI's office wearing a guest badge. In less than 24 hours, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Altman and Brockman were joining Microsoft to help lead Microsoft's "new advanced AI research team."
Sutskever has since expressed deep regret in being part of the decision to oust Altman. "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions," he wrote on X. "I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."
Altman responded to Sutskever's post with three heart emojis.
In a late Sunday night meeting with staff, Sutskever introduced Emmett Shear, former Twitch chief, as new interim CEO, replacing his predecessor Murati of two days. The brief meeting was reportedly held at one of OpenAI's San Francisco offices, and only a handful of the company's employees attended. The rest of the staff effectively staged a walk-out.
Murati was reportedly initially a source of anger for employees, given that she was Altman's initial replacement and was said to have known he was being removed the day prior. She's since decided to leave the company should Altman not return, along with Sutskever. Others, however, believe that Sutskever won't be easily forgiven and won't be invited to stay, or join a new venture at Microsoft.
Sustkever reportedly offered two explanations he purportedly received from the board, for firing Altman.
One explanation was that Altman was said to have given two people at OpenAI the same project. The other was that he allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel.
The explanations reportedly didn't make sense to employees and were not received well. Internally, employees speculated that this was a "coup" by the board.
A few hours after the meeting, an open letter was circulated among staff overnight, and signed by OpenAI leadership including Murati and Sutskever, in which they protested the board's decision to not bring Altman back. By mid-day Monday, it had been signed by over 90% of the employees, according to the latest count. Employees insisted they would resign if remaining members of board did not, and if new board members were not appointed.
The company's current board is made up of Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora; Tasha McCauley, a tech entrepreneur; Helen Toner, of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and Setskever.
Although Sutskever also signed the open letter threatening to leave the company, he is said to still technically be a member of the board. Altman and Brockman were also previously on the board.
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sutskever, Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, John Schulman and Altman. The company has since spun off a for-profit subsidiary and entered into a controversial business arrangement with Microsoft, a move questioned by observers as potentially illegal or shady at least.
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