WilmerHale, a prominent US law firm, is close to concluding a detailed review of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his dismissal from the artificial intelligence startup late last year, two people with knowledge of the process said.
The investigation, when complete, could provide insight into what happened behind the scenes with Altman and OpenAI's former board of directors, which fired him on Nov. 17 before reinstating him five days later. OpenAI, valued at more than $80 billion, has sparked a frenzy around ai and could help determine the direction of this transformative technology.
Altman, 38, has told people in recent weeks that the investigation was coming to an end, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The results could be delivered to OpenAI's board of directors as early as next month, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to confidentiality agreements.
OpenAI declined to comment. WilmerHale did not respond to a request for comment.
Investigators spent the past three months interviewing OpenAI employees and executives after its former board of directors said it no longer had confidence in Altman's ability to run the company, the people said. The board said Altman had not been “consistently truthful in his communications,” although he did not provide details.
Privately, the board was concerned that Altman was not sharing all of his plans to raise money from investors in the Middle East for an ai chip project, people with knowledge of the matter said.
After being ousted, Altman waged a bare-knuckle fight against some OpenAI directors to be reinstated as CEO. He won but made concessions. He agreed that OpenAI would hire a law firm to investigate his ouster and did not reinstate his seat on the company's board of directors. But he managed to renew the board, removing two members and adding two others.
OpenAI nearly imploded during the leadership crisis, jeopardizing a potential windfall for its investors, such as Microsoft, and its employees. In the months since Altman's reinstatement, insiders have rushed to contain the fallout, advising employees to keep potential dissent secret for fear of jeopardizing the company's fortunes.
OpenAI is considered a leader in generative ai, technology that can generate text, sounds and images from short prompts. It is also among the many companies aiming to build artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do anything the human brain can do.
Meta, Google, Microsoft and others are also racing to develop such technology. The leaders of these companies believe that AGI will revolutionize the computing industry, as well as the economy and global workforces.
