ChatGPT maker OpenAI ousts CEO Sam Altman

JFF

JFF

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Nov 17 (Reuters) - The board of the company behind ChatGPT late on Friday fired OpenAI CEO Sam Altman - to many, the human face of generative AI - sending shock waves across the tech industry.

OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati will serve as interim CEO, the company said, adding that it will conduct a formal search for a permanent CEO.

The announcement blindsided many employees who discovered the abrupt management shuffle from an internal announcement and the company's public facing blog.


"Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," OpenAI said in the blog without elaborating.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI president and co-founder, who stepped down from the board as chairman as part of the management shuffle, , he announced on messaging platform X late on Friday. "Based on today's news, i quit," he wrote.

www.reuters.com

ChatGPT maker OpenAI ousts CEO Sam Altman

The board of the company behind ChatGPT late on Friday fired OpenAI CEO Sam Altman - to many, the human face of generative AI - sending shock waves across the tech industry. Greg Brockman, OpenAI president and co-founder, quit the company, he announced on messaging platform X. "Based on today's...
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com

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A board of idiots, obviously --- not sure how else to put it. :sclap

No, he his not the "face" of AI -- but fire the guy who took the company from zero to 90 billion. You can only guess at what might be going on over there. But its probably not good.
 
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Interesting development. I would have liked to see the vote tally. Having parts of the board on your side makes your job cushier. Wonder if he had some allies left within it.
 
JFF said:
fire the guy who took the company from zero to 90 billion
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It's likely by design. He wants to leave and get paid lots more money elsewhere, and likely set it up so he can leave in a way without upsetting investors. Open AI seems to be overhyped so he's getting off the ship onto another before the reality sets in:witty
 
They're basically saying he's been lying to them. I can't even imagine what's going on that could bring them to do this at this moment.

Looks really wild:

 
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RavenSupreme said:
Interesting development. I would have liked to see the vote tally. Having parts of the board on your side makes your job cushier. Wonder if he had some allies left within it.
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They also removed the president of the board, who's another co-founder.

I hear the ex-CEO has quite an ego. It reminds me of Elon getting kicked off PayPal.
 
At this point, I can only imagine he's been embezzling money Bankman-Fried style. Even raping employees wouldn't get this kind of treatment.
 
dergeist said:
It's likely by design. He wants to leave and get paid lots more money elsewhere, and likely set it up so he can leave in a way without upsetting investors. Open AI seems to be overhyped so he's getting off the ship onto another before the reality sets in:witty
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Weird post.

LLMs have huge enterprise potential.

Literally everyone who has any familiarity with LLMs see the sheer amount of money that can be made by selling a customized model to a company instead of that company paying significantly more outsourcing to a company in India or Vietnam.

But I mean, you clearly know something Microsoft doesn’t.
 
dergeist said:
It's likely by design. He wants to leave and get paid lots more money elsewhere, and likely set it up so he can leave in a way without upsetting investors. Open AI seems to be overhyped so he's getting off the ship onto another before the reality sets in:witty
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That's not the way CEOs leave companies.
 
stream said:
They're basically saying he's been lying to them. I can't even imagine what's going on that could bring them to do this at this moment.

Looks really wild:

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That sounds like a coup.

And -- As you can see, there are advantages to being Elon Musk.
 
dergeist said:
It's likely by design. He wants to leave and get paid lots more money elsewhere, and likely set it up so he can leave in a way without upsetting investors. Open AI seems to be overhyped so he's getting off the ship onto another before the reality sets in:witty
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That is non-sense. Its rather underhyped.

Give it 2-3 years and everybody will be talking to a AI for assistance. Its just a matter of money / technical development currently.
 
If this were the case, I’d imagine there’d be a lot more military people lingering around.

It doesn’t seem likely that a company could make a breakthrough that significant and potentially dangerous without Uncle Sam watching them like a hawk. In contrast, this sounds like a political thing within OpenAI itself.
 

Today’s A.I. technology cannot destroy humanity.
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Whew. Although how do they know?

Anyway, this is all in the context of CEO Sam Altman's firing from OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT among other things. It's still a mystery why he was suddenly let go on Friday, but the hot gossip at the moment is that the board of directors was worried about Altman pushing AI to the point where it would be able to destroy humanity.

You have to admit, that would be the coolest reason ever for a CEO to get fired. And the AI community is just loony enough that this is faintly plausible. However, the OpenAI board includes at least two normal people (the CEO of Quora and a RAND scientist), so I have my doubts. It's one thing for the chief scientist of OpenAI (who's also on the board) to suddenly get paranoid over the fate of humanity—anything can happen, after all—but ordinary folks are generally a little more levelheaded.

On the other hand, the company's COO did say that the firing had nothing to do with "malfeasance"; it was just a "breakdown in communication between Sam and the board." Maybe. But that would have to be a helluva breakdown to set in motion the dramatic regicide of a guy who's practically a legend in the industry.

Eventually someone is going to have to talk. This is all just too weird.
 
The OpenAI affair just keeps getting weirder. The ringleader of the decision to fire CEO Sam Altman has always seemed to be Ilya Sutskever, one of OpenAI's founders and its chief scientist.
More than 500 employees of OpenAI have threatened to leave the company if the current board doesn’t resign and reinstate former Chief Executive Sam Altman and former President Greg Brockman. The threat was made in a letter to the board of directors and among the signees was Ilya Sutskever.
....On Monday morning, Sutskever posted on X trying to repair the damage. “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” he wrote. “I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
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What a complete shit show.
 
So now Altman and Brockman got hired by Microsoft, which owns almost half of OpenAI, and apparently the vast majority of openAI has declared in a letter that they will also jump ship to Microsoft unless the board resigns. No wonder Sutskever has regrets. There's a tiny chance he can blame the rest of the board and keep his job at OpenAI, but more than likely he's going to be kicked out hard.
 
Reading title i was expecting that now AI run HR and fire people. Ironically the guy made AI was fired by its creation. That would be poetic
 
wibisana said:
Reading title i was expecting that now AI run HR and fire people. Ironically the guy made AI was fired by its creation. That would be poetic
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If it happened like that, I'd imagine it go something like this, but the AI saying "Your role as CEO is no longer needed."
 
stream said:
So now Altman and Brockman got hired by Microsoft, which owns almost half of OpenAI, and apparently the vast majority of openAI has declared in a letter that they will also jump ship to Microsoft unless the board resigns. No wonder Sutskever has regrets. There's a tiny chance he can blame the rest of the board and keep his job at OpenAI, but more than likely he's going to be kicked out hard.
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wait, what? Couldn't microsoft have them go back to OpenAI then?
 
Jim said:
wait, what? Couldn't microsoft have them go back to OpenAI then?
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Microsoft does not (yet) have control of the OpenAI board, so they can't just order them back. Not sure what are the constraints on forcing the board to resign.

Microsoft could also just hire everybody and have them recreate ChatGPT internally, but it's not that easy. The OpenAI employees can't actually take the code with them, or the trained models, so it would be a big waste of time until everything works again.
 
Voyeur said:
thehill.com

Microsoft offering to match compensation for OpenAI employees threatening to resign

A top Microsoft executive announced that the company will match compensation for any OpenAI employees who threatened to resign from their positions with the company amid the ouster of former CEO Sa…
thehill.com thehill.com

Spicy..
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Very ...

While I think the principles of OpenAI are very important and should be uphold (that I understand fully and agree on), again, the move to kick Altman out like this was not smart.

And now Microsoft is looking how to benefit from it. It was foreseeable.
 
RavenSupreme said:
Man never bet against Microsoft I guess. They are winning without even having agreed to fight.
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Well, there are worse )))

And what people forget is the message you send. If I were the competition and I had the money to train such language models, then it is now or never. The moment you see a weakness. And I like to see OpenAI to be successful.

Frankly, this decision by the board was so bad that you could be forgiven for thinking that someone had been paid by the competition to sabotage the company. I could see that tactic being used by a certain company.

The danger of generative AI comes not from the so-called AI, but from the company that controls the technology.
 
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Aaand apparently Altman is going to be CEO again, with a brand new board.

Sam Altman Is Reinstated as OpenAI’s Chief Executive​

The move capped a chaotic five days at the artificial intelligence company.


Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, the company said, successfully reversing his ouster by OpenAI’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors.

The company’s board of directors will be overhauled, jettisoning several members who had opposed Mr. Altman. Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, will be the only holdover.

OpenAI had an “agreement in principle” for Mr. Altman to return as chief executive, it said in a . “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

The return of Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, the company’s president who had resigned in solidarity, and the remaking of the board, capped a frenetic five days that upended OpenAI, the maker of the ChatGPT chatbot and one of the world’s highest-profile artificial intelligence companies.

“I love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” Mr. Altman said in a , adding that he looked forward to reinforcing OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, its biggest investor.

OpenAI’s revamped board of directors will include Bret Taylor, an early Facebook officer and former co-chief executive of Salesforce; Lawrence Summers, the former Treasury secretary; and Mr. D’Angelo, a current board member and chief executive of the question and answer site, Quora.

Mr. Taylor will act as board chairman, the company said.

Microsoft supported the moves. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, on X that he was “encouraged by the changes to OpenAI board,” calling it a “first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

Mr. D’Angelo was leading the negotiations, according to two people in touch with the board. The general framework for the changes was in place by late Sunday, one of those people said.

Determining the composition of the board slowed down the decision to bring Mr. Altman back, according to that person and one other. OpenAI called the new board its “initial” board, indicating it could expand.

A person close to the board’s deliberations on Tuesday said that Mr. D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner pressed for certain concessions from Mr. Altman, including an independent investigation into his leadership of OpenAI.

In the end, Ms. Toner and Ms. McCauley agreed to step down from the board because it was clear that it needed a fresh start, this person close to deliberations said. If all of them stepped down, they worried that it would suggest the board erred even though they collectively felt they did the right thing, this person said.

The outgoing board focused on curbing Mr. Altman’s power. In addition to an investigation into his leadership, they blocked his and Mr. Brockman’s return to the board and objected to potential board members who they worried might not stand up to Mr. Altman, said this person close to the board negotiations.
OpenAI’s board surprised Mr. Altman and the company’s employees on Friday afternoon when it told him he was . Mr. Brockman, who co-founded the company with Mr. Altman and others, resigned in protest.
The ouster kicked off efforts by Mr. Altman, 38, his allies in the tech industry and OpenAI’s employees to force the company’s board to bring him back. On Sunday evening, after a weekend of negotiations, the board said it was going to stick with its decision.

But in a head-spinning development just hours later, Microsoft said that Mr. Altman, Mr. Brockman and others to start a new advanced artificial intelligence lab.

Most of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees signed a letter telling the board they would walk out and follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft if he wasn’t reinstated, in jeopardy.

Four board members — Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI founder; Mr. D’Angelo; Ms. Toner, a director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; and Ms. McCauley, an entrepreneur and computer scientist — had initially decided to push Mr. Altman out.

But as the employee revolt grew, Mr. Sutskever had second thoughts: “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” he said in a message on X. He also signed the letter. Mr. Sutskever is no longer on the board but remains an OpenAI employee.

“Ilya is thrilled that Sam is back as C.E.O. and he has been working tirelessly for days to make this happen,” said Mr. Sutskever’s lawyer, Alex Weingarten. “It is what is best for the company.”

OpenAI employees had been given this week off for Thanksgiving, but many workers remained in the office or glued to their screens to follow the drama. “Thank god,” one employee said. “We’re so back,” said another.
Thrive Capital, which is leading a new funding offer than will value OpenAI at more than $80 billion, said it would continue to partner with the company “now and in the future.”
Late on Tuesday night, OpenAI employees were celebrating Mr. Altman’s return in the company’s office. He phoned a reporter at The New York Times and said: “I hope you have a lovely Thanksgiving.”
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"Darkness took me. But it was not the end. I've been sent back until my task is done."
 
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