The chaos surrounding leadership at the AI company ChatGPT is over. Former boss Sam Altman moves to Microsoft. Twitch co-founder Shear is joining ChatGPT.
The US company Microsoft is benefiting from the leadership chaos at ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The ousted OpenAI boss Sam Altman and other employees will work for the software giant in the future. You are supposed to lead a new research team, as Microsoft boss Satya Nadella announced on the short message service X.
Microsoft is a large investor in OpenAI and, according to media reports, tried unsuccessfully to arrange Altman’s return to the top position at OpenAI over the weekend. Now Microsoft is strengthening its position in the race to develop artificial intelligence with the new personnel. The group not only has continued access to OpenAI’s technology as a major investor – but now also has some of its inventors in-house.
Dispute over direction probably the cause of Altman’s departure
Altman was ousted from the position of CEO of the company he co-founded on Friday. According to media reports, a dispute over direction at OpenAI led to Altman’s departure. Some leading figures, such as technology chief Ilya Sutskever, were of the opinion that Altman wanted to bring the software with artificial intelligence to market too quickly and with an approach that was too commercial. They got the majority of the board of directors on their side.
OpenAI’s backers, including Microsoft, failed in their attempt to bring Altman back. Instead, the board of directors even removed the interim boss Mira Murati, who was only appointed on Friday, from office and who is said to have sided with Altman in the meantime.
Twitch founder Shear is now temporarily at the top
After hours of negotiations over the weekend, the OpenAI employees were presented with another interim boss, as reported by the industry service “The Information” and the Bloomberg news agency, among others. It is then the co-founder and long-time boss of the gaming-focused streaming service Twitch, Emmett Shear.
OpenAI 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 OpenAI’s access to the necessary computing power. However, the conflict between the two approaches became ever deeper.
The chatbot ChatGPT can formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human. Its publication around a year ago sparked AI hype. OpenAI 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.