After Five Days of Corporate Drama, Fired OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is Back in Charge
OpenAI Investors Were Considering Lawsuit Against Board after CEO’s Firing Last Week
It’s been a while since we reviewed the status of Artificial Intelligence (AI), and looked at the capabilities of the OpenAI chatbot, ChatGPT.
Well, it truly has been a wild week at OpenAI, which began when the board abruptly fired its CEO and founder, Sam Altman.
The company, in a statement, said an internal investigation found that Altman was not always truthful with the board.
“Mr. 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,” the company said in its statement. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
…The news follows OpenAI’s first developer conference held in San Francisco last week, where Altman served as the master of ceremonies, unveiling a series of new artificial intelligence tool updates, including the ability for developers to create custom versions of ChatGPT. He also shared about 2 million developers now use the platform, and about 90% of Fortune 500 companies are using the tools internally. It currently has 100 million active users.
Fellow OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman quit after he was pushed from the company’s board in the shakeup. Microsoft then quickly hired both Altman and Brockman.
The company that created ChatGPT was thrown into turmoil Monday after Microsoft hired its ousted CEO and many employees threatened to follow him in a conflict that centered in part on how to build artificial intelligence that’s smarter than humans.
…Microsoft, which has been a close partner of the company and invested billions of dollars in it, announced that Altman and OpenAI’s former president, Greg Brockman, would lead its new advanced AI research team. Brockman, also an OpenAI co-founder, quit in protest after Altman was fired.
Hundreds of OpenAI employees, including other top executives, threatened to join them at Microsoft in an open letter addressed to OpenAI’s four-member board that called for the board’s resignation and Altman’s return.
“If the architects and vision and brains behind these products have now left, the company will be a shell of what it once was,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute. “All of that brain trust going to Microsoft will then mean that these impressive tools will be coming out of Microsoft. It will be hard to see OpenAI continue to thrive as a company.”
Then, very unhappy investors in OpenAI began to weigh options for suing the company’s board.
Sources said investors are working with legal advisers to study their options. It was not immediately clear if these investors will sue OpenAI.
Investors worry that they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector.
OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Microsoft (MSFT.O) owns 49% of the for-profit operating company, according to sources familiar with the matter. Other investors and employees control 49%, with 2% owned by OpenAI’s nonprofit parent, according to Semafor.
Now Altman is back…and most of the board that fired him is gone.
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 post to X. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”
Meanwhile, chatbot testing capabilities are expanding. A recent review of AI, especially the more advanced GPT-4, shows it is passing a wide variety of tests: SAT, GRE, and a variety of AP exams. In fact, it will even pass the written test for being a wine-taster.
GPT-4 has passed the Introductory Sommelier, Certified Sommelier, and Advanced Sommelier exams at respective rates of 92%, 86%, and 77%, according to OpenAI.
Altman and OpenAI investors could probably use a good sommelier about now. They will need wine to celebrate a corporate battle victory and soothe their nerves.
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Comments
Attempted coup, was it driven by ego or greed?
Neither, the old board were into effective altruism and Altman wasn’t onboard with that from what I heard.
Yes, it would helpful to know the points of disagreement which formed the basis for the Board’s decisions. If MSFT owns 49% of the company, then it has a lot of Board member voting power. Which Bd members were MSFT people, and what was their role in these Bd decisions?
When AI decides to start computing trinomially (-1, 0 and 1) as opposed to binary (0, 1) things will really get lit.
The square root of three has an inverse.
Binary digits are referred to as ‘bits’. When trinary digits are referred to in a logically similar way, all progress in computer science will come to an end.
*ternary
No reason that computing cannot be based on number base 3. You just need a 3 state switch. Though I cannot think of a good reason use base 3 over base 2.
I attempted to steal a joke from Howard Taylor. It is not that base 3 computing would not work, but that those who write code based on bits would become all bashful trying to write code based on something that rhymes with bits.
Intelligence does not mean smart or good. Look at all the human havoc caused by the intelligent and technology. One need only look at “smart” phones and the coming leadership of Gen Z . Caveat emptor!
Surely there are some Gen Z who are not idiots?
Yes. The home-schooled, or those whose education was from public school districts that have not bought into the horse manure so popular and trendy in big-city and “progressive” districts.
At some point in the next ten years AI will be more than capable of doing all sorts of jobs. The product will still need review/editing but there will be some job classifications that could be effectively replaced by AI. That is going to be disruptive as hell to society and this is part of where the 15 min City/lifestyle, the virtual world immersion and universal basic income push comes from.
We have had a lot of disruptive times brought by technology. Thousands of elevator boys put out of work by self-service elevators. The “automatic exchange” technology put tens of thousands of telephone operators out of work. Automatic page layout and composition ended work for untold thousands of Linotype operators on the street.
Who keeps leaking these plot lines for the next Terminator film?
Does anybody have a take on what was actually going on here?