A few days after his surprising expulsion, Sam Altman became head of Open AI again, the company behind the well-known artificial intelligence chatbot Chat-GPT. In addition, the board of directors is largely replaced, as Open AI announced on Wednesday night. Altman was only kicked out of the AI company by the old board of directors on Friday and decided on Sunday to go to the major Open AI investor Microsoft. Afterwards, about 700 of Open AI’s 770 employees threatened to quit and follow him. That would have practically 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 the “Altman camp” and publicly regretted that he had taken part in his dismissal.
The gap grew deeper and deeper
Open AI was founded in 2015 by Altman and other AI enthusiasts as a non-profit organization – with the stated mission of developing artificial intelligence in the interests of all people. 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 into the company as an investor, thereby securing Open AI access to a lot of money and the necessary computing power that can be used to train state-of-the-art self-learning software.
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.