A few days after his surprising dismissal, Sam Altman becomes head of the chat GPT developer Open AI again. In addition, the board of directors will be renewed, as Open AI announced on Wednesday night. Altman was only forced out by the old board of directors on Friday and decided on Sunday to go to Open AI investor Microsoft. Afterwards, around 700 of Open AI’s 770 employees threatened to follow him – which would have effectively meant the end of the company.
According to media reports, a dispute over direction at Open AI led to Altman’s departure. Some executives, such as technology chief Ilya Sutskever, believed that Altman was bringing artificial intelligence software to market too quickly and with too commercial an approach. They got the majority of the board of directors on their side. In the meantime, Sutskever also switched to Altman’s camp and publicly regretted his involvement in his dismissal.
The conflict became deeper and deeper
Open AI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization – with the mission to develop artificial intelligence in the interests of everyone. However, when it became clear that donations would not raise the necessary billions in investments, a for-profit company was formed with Altman at the helm. Among other things, he brought Microsoft on board as an investor, thereby securing Open AI’s access to the necessary computing power.
However, the conflict between the two approaches became ever deeper. The chatbot Chat-GPT can formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human. Its release about a year ago sparked AI hype. Open AI has thus become a pioneer in the technology. Microsoft entered into a multi-billion dollar pact with the company to bring its technology into the company’s products. Other tech heavyweights such as Google, Amazon and the Facebook group Meta presented competing software.