Sam Altman has been fired from OpenAI, Inc., the nonprofit organization that serves as the governing body of OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, GPT-4, and other powerful generative AI systems. . . Both will step down from the company's board of directors and step down as CEO.
With a release On the official OpenAI blog, the company writes that Altman's departure follows a "board review process" that concluded that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications" with other board members, "hindering their ability to exercise their responsibilities.
“The board no longer has confidence in Altman's ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the publication also indicates.
In a post on X, Altman wrote that he "loved his time at OpenAI" and will have "more to say about it later."
I loved my time at openai. Was transformative for me personally and, hopefully, a little for the world. Most of all, I loved it. working with such talented people. I'll have more to say about what comes next —Sam Altman (@sama) November 17th 2023
OpenAI's sudden leadership change will also see Greg Brockman, who was a member of the team that co-founded OpenAI, like Altman, step down as chairman of the board but remain as president of OpenAI, reporting to the company's newly appointed interim CEO. Look Murati. Murati was previously CTO of OpenAI.
OpenAI says it will begin conducting a formal search for a permanent CEO immediately.
“OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” the board wrote in a joint statement. “The board remains fully committed to fulfilling this mission. We appreciate Sam's many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company's research, product and security functions, Mira is uniquely qualified to assume the role of interim CEO. “We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”
Sam Altman is one of my heroes. He built a company from nothing to a value of $90 billion and changed our collective world forever. I can't wait to see what he does next. I and billions of people will benefit from his future work; It will be simply amazing. Thank you… —Eric Schmidt (@ericschmidt) November 17th 2023
The OpenAI board of directors now consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever; Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora; tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Altman's dismissal comes unexpectedly, to say the least. The company recently hosted its first developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, emceed by Altman. Altman spoke at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference and at an event in Oakland, California, on Thursday. AND according to The Verge and New York Times, citing multiple internal sources, OpenAI employees learned of Altman's firing when it was announced publicly.
Altman has a long history leading OpenAI. After co-founding the company alongside Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and others, Altman, who ran startup accelerator Y Combinator and also sits on the board of Worldcoin, the ambitious cryptocurrency project, initially He was co-president of OpenAI with Elon Musk. Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla.
Over the past few months, Altman has played an active role in trying to shape regulators' responses to AI, appearing at US Congressional hearings and meeting in person with world leaders, including President Joe Biden, the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and French President Emmanuel Macron, among others, on an international political tour.
More importantly than being one of the most brilliant and impactful people our industry has ever had, Sam is one of the most generous and caring people I know. I have never met someone who has supported and encouraged more people around him than him. He couldn't be a prouder brother. -Jack Altman (@jaltma) November 17th 2023
It's unclear what mistakes Altman might have made running OpenAI today. But they evidently relate to his relationship with OpenAI's rather unusual board composition and corporate governance structure, and perhaps OpenAI's active talks to raise substantially new capital.
A recent article in VentureBeat explored, OpenAI's for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC, which is fully controlled by OpenAI's non-profit organization. While the for-profit subsidiary is allowed to commercialize its technology, it is subject to the nonprofit's mission: to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can, as OpenAI defines it, “outperform human beings in most economically valuable jobs.
The board of directors of OpenAI, a nonprofit organization, has the power to determine when the company has reached AGI and to exclude this AGI from intellectual property licenses and other commercial terms, including with Microsoft, one of the largest investors of OpenAI and a strong integrator of the various OpenAI technologies.
Microsoft has invested $13.000 billion in OpenAI so far and has a 49% stake in the company. The former's share price fell more than 1% in the last 30 minutes of trading, after Altman's departure was announced; Axios reported Microsoft notified that Altman would be leaving "minutes" before the public announcement.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, but restructured in 2019 as a “limited profit” company to raise capital, a recognition of the enormous costs associated with training cutting-edge AI systems. Underscoring this point, Altman said in a interview e with the Financial Times that it "hoped" Microsoft would increase its investment to help pay for the "huge" impending model training costs.
OpenAI's press department declined to comment beyond the official blog post. But Microsoft's PR team gave a statement from Frank Shaw, its director of communications: "We have a long-term partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and her team as we bring this next era of AI to our customers."
Nadella later published a declaration:
“As you saw at Microsoft Ignite this week, we continue to rapidly innovate for this era of AI, with more than 100 announcements across the technology spectrum, from AI systems, models, and tools in Azure to Copilot. Most importantly, we are committed to delivering all of this to our customers while building for the future. We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda and an exciting product roadmap; and remain committed to our association, and to Mira and the team. Together, we will continue to deliver the significant benefits of this technology to the world."
