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Sam Altman is returning to OpenAI as its CEO, just days after he was dramatically pushed out of the company he co-founded in 2015. The move comes after nearly all of the staff threatened to quit and a new interim board was instated.
Late Tuesday night, San Francisco-based OpenAI posted to X that the company had a new board chaired by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo were also named to the board. D'Angelo is the only holdover from OpenAI's previous board.
Many of the details of the negotiations are still unclear, but the announcement follows days of intense conversations with Altman, interim CEO Emmett Shear, and others within the company. "Coming into OpenAI, I wasn't sure what the right path would be," Shear, who joined OpenAI on Monday, wrote on X. "This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I'm glad to have been a part of the solution."
In his own post on X, Altman wrote that he loves OpenAI and "everything I've done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together."
The fast-moving events have been compared to the plot of Succession for the Silicon Valley set. OpenAI, which makes generative artificial intelligence products such as ChatGPT, announced on Friday that Altman, the company's CEO and public face, would be leaving the company because he was "not consistently candid in his communications with the board."
Over the weekend, the company cycled through two interim CEOs, faced employee revolt, and saw president Greg Brockman resign in protest. Late Sunday night, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that Altman and Brockman would be coming to Microsoft to start a new AI research institute, and that the company would welcome other employees from OpenAI. (Brockman said last night he's returning to OpenAI.)
The move initially seemed like a victory for Microsoft, a key partner that has invested $13 billion to date in OpenAI. Nadella already signaled that he would support Altman if he returned to OpenAI, telling Bloomberg on Monday, "irrespective of where Sam is, he's working with Microsoft."
"We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board," Nadella wrote in a statement posted to X and Microsoft's website late last night. "We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners."
The drama of the past few days has put a spotlight on OpenAI's unusual governance structure. In 2015, OpenAI was created as a non-profit research institute by Altman, Elon Musk, and others. The non-profit structure had the "goal of building safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity."
But developing artificial general intelligence -- essentially brain-like reasoning capabilities in a computer -- proved to be an expensive endeavor, and in 2019, OpenAI created a for-profit subsidiary. As OpenAI released new products, like image generation software Dall-E, and took on billions in investment, the company was still controlled by the nonprofit's board of directors.
The new three-person board has been described as an "initial" board, and according to reports, Microsoft is pushing for a seat on the board, as is Altman.
The boardroom shakeup also points to an ongoing rift within the company between those who want to quickly commercialize A.I. products and those worried that under Altman's leadership, the company was moving too fast while ignoring potential harms from disseminating misinformation to ushering in an era of autonomous warfare.
Ilya Sutskever--a company co-founder and chief scientist who supported and then retracted his support for Altman's ouster--was reportedly among those urging more caution. He appears to be staying with OpenAI but has been relieved of his board seat.
Tasha McCauley of the RAND Corporation and Helen Toner of Georgetown University's Center for Security and Emerging Technology, are also out. Toner co-authored a paper earlier this year criticizing some of OpenAI's safety practices. Both former board members have ties to effective altruism, a philosophical movement that has taken hold in Silicon Valley and looks to address existential threats to humanity, such as runaway artificial intelligence. Generative A.I. startup Anthropic was founded in 2021 by former OpenAI employees with ties to the movement, who were worried about OpenAI's pace of development.
Today, more immediate economic concerns seem to have prevailed over existential fears, and those urging caution have lost sway within the company. But OpenAI's very structure seems to acknowledge fears about runaway A.I. Wired reported earlier this year that "the company's financial documents even stipulate a kind of exit contingency for when AI wipes away our whole economic system."
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