Most of OpenAI’s staff have threatened to resign from the company and join Microsoft, which has hired ousted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and former OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new “research team.” advanced ai.” In a letter to the OpenAI board of directors reported this morning by cabling and journalist Kara SwisherMore than five hundred current OpenAI employees say that “Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees in this new subsidiary should we decide to join.”
The letter says OpenAI employees will resign if the board does not reinstate Altman and Brockman and then resign. But since the board has already made its decision, decided to stay on and name a new CEO, as Altman and Brockman head to Microsoft, it looks like Microsoft just found Altman’s first few hundred employees, assuming they’re right about the company’s promise to hire them all.
The OpenAI employees who sign the letter accuse the company’s board of directors of jeopardizing their jobs and having “undermined our mission and our company.” They also reject the idea that OpenAI was moving too quickly without concern for security. “Our work on ai safety and governance shapes global norms,” they write.
Swisher reports that there are currently 700 employees as OpenAI and that more firms are still being added to the letter. The letter appears to have been written before last night’s events, suggesting that it has been circulating since Altman’s firing was approaching. It also means that it may be too late for OpenAI’s board to act on the memo’s demands, if they wanted to.
Microsoft has created a special “ai advanced research team” to house several former OpenAI employees, and Sam Altman has been offered a CEO title to lead the division. It’s an unusual move for Microsoft outside of acquisitions, as the company typically only uses the CEO title for leaders of large divisions like Microsoft Gaming or acquired companies like LinkedIn and GitHub. OpenAI employees have made it clear that Microsoft is treating this as a big acquisition, assuring existing employees that there are positions open to join Sam Altman and his team at Microsoft.
Altman’s hiring came just hours after negotiations with OpenAI’s board failed to bring him back as OpenAI CEO over the weekend. Instead, former Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has been named interim CEO. He will replace Mira Murati, who was named interim CEO of OpenAI following Altman’s surprise firing on Friday. Murati tops the list of OpenAI employees threatening to join Microsoft.
Microsoft’s new advanced ai research team, led by Altman and Brockman, comes just a week after Microsoft announced that it has built its own custom ai chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid costly dependency from Nvidia. Altman had reportedly recently been pitching investors a separate startup to build custom ai Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips that rival Nvidia, according to technology/ousted-openai-ceo-makes-plans-for-new-artificial-intelligence-company.html”>The New York Times.
