Turmoil at OpenAI: after firing Sam Altman, what's next for the home of ChatGPT? – The Verge
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By Richard Lawler, a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.
On November 17th, OpenAI’s board abruptly announced that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was out, effective immediately. Without saying it directly, the board revealed Altman was fired after a review “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”
One day later, sources tell The Verge that the board is in discussions with Sam Altman about bringing him back as its CEO.
What caused the board to lose confidence in his ability to lead OpenAI is unknown. In the preceding days, everyone had continued acting as though everything was normal, with insiders at OpenAI and partners like Microsoft surprised to learn of Altman’s ouster only moments before it was announced.
Within hours, fellow co-founder and former chair Greg Brockman announced that “based on today’s news, I quit.” OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, has been appointed interim CEO for now.
The shakeup comes just shy of one year after the launch of ChatGPT, which quickly entered mainstream conversation, became one of the fastest-growing apps in history, and initiated an industry-wide race to build generative AI tools and hardware to power them. At OpenAI’s first developer conference just a week before his ouster, Altman said the service had over 100 million weekly users, and more than two million developers were building on the company’s APIs.
All of the news and updates about OpenAI’s executive turnover continue below.
TODAY, 24 seconds ago
Nilay Patel
We’d heard there was a threat of mass resignations at 5PM PT. Then OpenAI employees began mass-quote-tweeting Sam Altman saying he loved them with heart emojis, leading everyone to assume he indeed was coming back as CEO. But it’s still not a done deal, and we still don’t know exactly what all that meant. What we do know is that talks appear to be done for today, so we’re going to bed, Las Vegas Grand Prix be damned. We’ll try this all again tomorrow.
TODAY, 1:43 AM UTC
Nilay Patel
Big update to our scoop from earlier: a key 5PM PT deadline for the OpenAI board to strike a deal to resign and Sam Altman to return has passed, and mass resignations at OpenAI may come soon, unless this thing gets done.
TODAY, 12:43 AM UTC
Richard Lawler
Along with the news from Alex Heath and Nilay Patel that OpenAI’s board is in discussions with just-fired CEO Sam Altman about his return, now Bloomberg reports that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella “has been in touch with Altman and pledged to support him in whatever steps he takes next.”
The Wall Street Journal writes that Microsoft (the nonprofit’s primary financial backer) and Thrive Capital (its second-largest shareholder) are “ helping orchestrate the efforts” to restore Altman.
And according to this report by Forbes, the plan some investors are considering is to make the board consider the situation “untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors.”
Nov 18
Alex Heath and Nilay Patel
The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as its CEO, according to multiple people familiar with the matter. One of them said Altman, who was suddenly fired by the board on Friday with no notice, is “ambivalent” about coming back and would want significant governance changes.
Update, 5:35PM PT: A source close to Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. If Altman decides to leave and start a new company, those staffers would assuredly go with him.
Nov 18
Wes Davis
The Information reported today that, fresh off being forced out of OpenAI, Sam Altman is spreading the word among investors that he has a new project in the works, possibly with the company’s former president, Greg Brockman.
Not long ago, rumors said Altman and Jony Ive would partner on an “iPhone of Artificial Intelligence” project, but later he said whatever ideas he has are “very nascent.”
[The Information]
Nov 18
Wes Davis
That’s according to a memo Axios saw that chief operating officer Brad Lightcap sent out. Lightcap ruled out some of the possible reasons why Altman was let go:
“We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.”
After OpenAI announced Altman’s firing, company president Greg Brockman quit, as did three senior researchers.
[Axios]
Nov 18
Wes Davis
The Information has the story. The outlet says Research director Jakub Pachocki, AI risk evaluation head Aleksander Madry, and longtime researcher Szymon Sidor resigned following Sam Altman’s surprise firing yesterday.
The article notes that Pachocki and Sidor had worked with Greg Brockman (who also left the company yesterday) on OpenAI’s Dota 2-playing AI bot, while Madry joined the company in May 2023, later forming a team to mitigate AI risks.
[The Information]
Nov 18
Richard Lawler
Former OpenAI president and chair Greg Brockman’s post on X tells his version of the events that pushed Sam Altman out of OpenAI (Altman reshared the post, and put up a message that today “has been sorta like reading your own eulogy while you’re still alive”).
According to Brockman, OpenAI Chief Scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever texted Altman on Thursday night asking to talk at noon on Friday (November 17th). At noon, on a Google Meet call with Sutskever, as well as non-employee board members Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner, “Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon.”
Within minutes, Sutskever invited Brockman to a Google Meet call where he was informed of his removal from the board “…and that Sam had been fired. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post.”
Nov 18
Alex Heath
On Thursday night, Sam Altman showed up at a warehouse in Oakland to talk to a room full of artists about generative AI. It was a busy day; just hours before, he was onstage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in downtown San Francisco speaking to world leaders.
At the Oakland warehouse, Altman was his usual self, cheering OpenAI’s work and coming across as relaxed, according to someone in the audience. He couldn’t linger, though. At about 7:40PM he told the room that he was running late to a meeting and bounced.
Nov 18
Jay Peters
Sam Altman isn’t the only major OpenAI executive leaving the company on Friday. Hours after Altman was fired, with the board saying it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” co-founder and former board chair Greg Brockman revealed on X that he is also quitting.
When OpenAI announced the “leadership transition” and that CTO Mira Murati would take over as interim CEO, it said that Brockman would step down as chairman but remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. Just a few hours later, that’s no longer true.
Nov 17
Emma Roth
The former CEO was suddenly fired by OpenAI’s board on Friday, and in a post on X, he gave no details on what happened but said he’ll “have more to say about what’s next later.”
Nov 17
Jay Peters and Alex Heath
Update November 18th, 7:02PM ET: Multiple sources tell The Verge that after firing Altman, OpenAI’s board is in discussions with him about returning. Our original story continues below.
Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.
Nov 6
Alex Heath
With the release of ChatGPT one year ago, OpenAI introduced the world to the idea of an AI chatbot that can seemingly do anything. Now, the company is releasing a platform for making custom versions of ChatGPT for specific use cases — no coding required.
In the coming weeks, these AI agents, which OpenAI is calling GPTs, will be accessible through the GPT Store. Details about how the store will look and work are scarce for now, though OpenAI is promising to eventually pay creators an unspecified amount based on how much their GPTs are used. GPTs will be available to paying ChatGPT Plus subscribers and OpenAI enterprise customers, who can make internal-only GPTs for their employees.
Nov 6
Jon Porter
One hundred million people are using ChatGPT on a weekly basis, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced at its first-ever developer conference on Monday. Since releasing its ChatGPT and Whisper models via API in March, the company also now boasts over two million developers, including over 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies.
OpenAI announced the figures as it detailed a range of new features, including a platform for building custom versions of ChatGPT to help with specific tasks and GPT-4 Turbo, a new model that has knowledge of world events up to April 2023 and which can fit the equivalent of over 300 pages of text in a single prompt.
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