Silicon Valley
Microsoft promised him a new home: Why Sam Altman couldn’t give up on OpenAI so quickly
A move to Microsoft wouldn’t have only had advantages for Sam Altman
© Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
At first it sounded like a coup: After OpenAI kicked out founder and CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft offered the tech genius a new home. But Altman is actually better positioned at OpenAI.
Just imagine: Your current job at a comparatively small but up-and-coming company has been lost. Less than a day later, an industry giant comes knocking and offers a professional future. Sounds great, right? That’s exactly what many people thought would have been their first thought when Microsoft OpenAI chaos intervened and offered the fired CEO Sam Altman a job.
The conditions also sounded like paradise. Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella publicly announced that they would offer Altman and anyone who wanted to separate from OpenAI a new home and leave enough space for the former colleagues to develop freely as a closed unit under the new roof.
Likewise, it seemed like Nadella had made the best of a difficult situation. As a major investor in OpenAI, there is a lot of money at stake for the Windows company if the AI start-up declines or even fails – both cases were conceivable scenarios after Altman’s departure. Securing at least the leading head and his team, as well as being able to work on new projects independently of co-decision makers, would certainly have at least alleviated the pain.
Tech giants competed for OpenAI specialists
But things had to happen quickly: Shortly after it became known that many OpenAI employees wanted to quit if Altman did not return, other industry leaders also courted the highly specialized talent. For example, Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff came forward with one public address to OpenAI researchers and wrote on November 20, “Salesforce is offering any OpenAI researcher who has submitted their resignation a full cash and equity investment to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese.”
Job offers from companies like Nvidia, But Altman’s old team proved time and time again to be extremely loyal – and waited to see what the former boss would do next.
In the end – it now seems – it wasn’t Microsoft, but OpenAI again. And that’s even better for both sides than giving Altman and his team a new home. Why?
Microsoft would not be the best alternative for Sam Altman
Although Microsoft would have brought a real AI heavyweight on board with Altman, ultimately the work on projects like ChatGPT would have had to start all over again. Although Altman has enormous knowledge, the projects belong to his company.
No employee could have simply continued or repeated the work – on the contrary. If Microsoft had tried this, the company might have been overwhelmed with lawsuits for theft of trade secrets. It is quite possible that most, if not all, OpenAI researchers also have corresponding passages in their contracts that prohibit exactly this anyway and make the respective people directly liable in the event of violations.
In addition, there is the aforementioned loss of around $13 billion that Microsoft invested in OpenAI. If such a significant portion of the workforce had changed, the start-up would probably have gone under – and the money would have been lost.
Recently, onboarding and paying 500 new employees would have been a huge undertaking for Microsoft – and on top of that not a good signal for the workforce there, which has recently had to deal with numerous layoffs and frozen salaries.
It remains to be seen what Microsoft does
Without a doubt, it is most convenient for everyone involved if Altman gets his position back at OpenAI first and continues where he had to leave off last week.
It cannot be ruled out that Microsoft will now strengthen the collaboration again or even think about taking over OpenAI completely. The company would then have to spend another huge sum, but in addition to Altman and his crew, it would also have all the products on board. Microsoft certainly has experience with such takeovers, for example with Linkedin, Github and the Minecraft makers at Mojang.