Sam Altman
ChatGPT developer OpenAI brings fired boss back
First gone, now back again: Sam Altman. photo
© Sven Hoppe/dpa
Company bosses getting fired happens all the time. It is rare that 90 percent of employees want to follow him. For ChatGPT maker OpenAI, this decided the power struggle.
After five days of leadership chaos at ChatGPT developer OpenAI, the ousted boss returns Sam Altman back on top.
The 38-year-old co-founder is now likely to be in a stronger position than before the surprising expulsion. The board of directors that kicked him out on Friday is being restructured. Investors like Microsoft are also putting pressure on OpenAI to change its structure so that the situation does not repeat itself.
After Altman’s expulsion, events accelerated. The largest OpenAI investor, Microsoft, took Altman in so that he could continue his research into artificial intelligence. Then around 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees threatened to follow Altman. Such a migration would have brought the start-up to the edge of the abyss – while Microsoft would have run away from its AI rival in one fell swoop. In the end, the previous board of directors gave in to demands for his resignation.
ChatGPT is the AI chatbot that triggered the hype about artificial intelligence a year ago with expectations ranging from a digital land of milk and honey for everyone to the fear of humanity being wiped out. Accordingly, OpenAI became the most important start-up in the world – a company that could change the world and put tech heavyweights like Google and the Facebook group Meta under pressure.
Between public benefit and returns
But things were simmering behind the scenes. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit with the goal of developing artificial intelligence for everyone using open models. However, since it became apparent that donations would not be enough to cover the vast amounts of computing power required, a for-profit company was founded with co-founder Altman at the helm. She was placed under the Board of Directors and committed to following OpenAI’s original mission. The structure was a time bomb that exploded last Friday.
According to media reports, an internal investigation will now clarify what exactly happened. The board removed Altman, saying they had lost trust because he had not been honest in his communications with the board. In the polished world of press releases, it is a brutal formulation that suggests between the lines: Something unpleasant has happened. But over the weekend all the Silicon Valley media tried in vain to find out what Altman was supposed to have done. The second interim boss in three days apparently didn’t get an answer.
Altman was too fast and commercial for some
The explanation in the media for Altman’s expulsion: The members of the board of directors who were committed to the original OpenAI mission found Altman’s innovations too fast, too irresponsible and too commercial. Unlike other founders such as Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook or Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, Altman did not have any shares that would give him control of the company.
The fact that Altman was also a member of the six-member board of directors didn’t help him much. The majority of four members informed him that he was out of his job. Upon returning, Altman will not be a member of the oversight board, at least initially. Of the people who fired him, only one remains: the head of the question-and-answer platform Quora, Adam d’Angelo. New on board are former Treasury Secretary Larry Summer and software entrepreneur Bret Taylor, who is crisis-tested in the position. Last year, Taylor chaired Twitter’s board of directors when tech billionaire Elon Musk first made a $44 billion purchase offer – and then tried to get out of the deal.
According to a report, Altman should also join the board of directors
The tech blog “The Verge” also reported that the main task of this mini-committee should be to put together a board of directors with up to nine members who will reform the structure behind OpenAI. Microsoft, as a major investor, will probably get a seat – and Altman will probably get a seat too.
The chatbot ChatGPT can formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human. 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.