Big brawl at OpenAI. Altman himself will not return to the company. We know what the management was afraid of

The firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI announced on Friday was a complete surprise in the technology industry. Altman is one of several co-founders (including Elon Musk and Greg Brockman) of this leading startup dealing with artificial intelligence and one of the most important figures in the world of AI. Even the company’s key investors were surprised by the sudden decision, including Microsoft, which has been investing billions of dollars in OpenAI for years.

Earthquake at OpenAI. Altman will not return. The board was thinking about it all weekend

The OpenAI management board announced the reasons for its decision on Friday in a very laconic and short statement, stating that the CEO “was not consistently honest in his communication with the management board,” which allegedly made it difficult for him to perform his duties. Details were not provided at that time. Unofficially, it was said that there was still a chance to reach an agreement with the management board or change its composition and restore Altman to his position.

However, as he reported, talks between management board members continued throughout the weekend and they ultimately ruled out the possibility of further cooperation with Altman. The board said it “firmly stands by its decision as the only path to achieving and defending OpenAI’s mission.” It added that “Sam’s behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board undermined the board’s ability to effectively oversee the company in the manner it was authorized to do,” the NYT quoted him as saying.

The board did not provide any specific examples of the former AI chief’s “behavior” in question. However, he allegedly “lost trust” in him. He also appointed a new president of the company. It was Emmett Shear, who until March this year. was the CEO of Twitch. It was also noted that it is crucial that “each CEO behaves honestly and transparently towards his or her management board.”

In the background there is a conflict with another co-founder. And a smart move by Microsoft

that Altman was aggressively trying to attract more investors despite the risks associated with artificial intelligence, which did not please OpenAI’s principal researchers. A conflict allegedly ensued over this matter between Altman and Ilya Sutskever, another co-founder who was among the organization’s scientists. Sutskever was also concerned about his weakening position in the company.

Another co-founder, technology director and board member (removed from this board a few hours earlier), Greg Brockman, resigned from his job at OpenAI on the same day. As a gesture of solidarity with Altman and Brockman, many other people resigned from working at OpenAI, including: three Poles – Jakub Pachocki (research director), Aleksander Mądry (head of the AI ​​threats team) and Szymon Sidor, who has been associated with the company for seven years.

Paradoxically, Microsoft may benefit most from changes in OpenAI. On Monday, the US tech giant announced that both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are joining the company and will lead a newly created artificial intelligence research team at Microsoft. We will write more about this in the next article.

OpenAI is an American research laboratory founded in 2015, initially operating as a non-profit organization (currently divided into the OpenAI Incorporated organization and the commercial OpenAI Limited Partnership). OpenAI’s goal is to promote and develop artificial intelligence. In November 2022, the company released the ChatuGPT prototype, which was the first such large-scale intelligent chatbot and significantly accelerated the development of generative artificial intelligence. OpenAI was founded by nine investors (including Sam Altman and Greg Brockman), who invested one billion dollars in the development of the organization, and nine scientists (including a Pole, Wojciech Zaremba).