One of the strangest episodes in the history of the tech industry ended as startup events often do: with a party in San Francisco’s eclectic Mission District.
On Tuesday night, OpenAI said Sam Altman would return as its CEO, five days after the ai startup’s board forced him to resign. At the company’s San Francisco office, giddy employees ate chicken tenders, drank boba tea and champagne and celebrated Mr. Altman’s return well into the night.
Altman’s reinstatement capped a corporate drama that mixed piles of money, a pressure campaign from allies, intense media attention and a firm belief among some in the ai community that they should proceed cautiously with what they were doing. building.
Now OpenAI, which for two days appeared to be on the verge of collapse just a year after introducing the popular chatbot ChatGPT, will replace a much-criticized board of directors with a more traditional group that includes former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and a former executive at the giant. of Salesforce software.
More board members are expected to join soon, who could be chosen from OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft, and the ai research community. Altman was not named to the board Tuesday night and it was unclear if he ever will be.
On Wednesday, what seemed to be emerging from the mess was a company more prepared to handle the billions of dollars that had been poured into it and the attention it has received since launching ChatGPT. But some are already arguing that it won’t be as in tune with OpenAI’s original mission of creating ai that is safe for the world.
The OpenAI debacle has illustrated that building ai systems is testing whether entrepreneurs who want to make money can work in sync with researchers who fear that what they are developing could eventually eliminate jobs or become a threat if technologies like weapons autonomous ones get out of control.
The tech industry, perhaps even the world, will be watching to see if OpenAI is any closer to balancing those dueling aspirations than it was a week ago.
“We will look back on this period as a very brief, very dramatic episode that gave us a public and dramatic reset,” said Aaron Levie, chief executive of Box, an online data storage provider. “This needs to be a trusted organization that is aligned with its board, and at the end of the day, OpenAI is a more valuable organization than it was a week ago.”
When Altman, 38, was fired shortly after noon on Friday, OpenAI was thrown into chaos. His employees and Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the company, were surprised.
The ai company has an unusual governance structure. It is controlled by the board of directors of a nonprofit organization, and its investors have no formal way to influence decisions. But no one anticipated that four members of the board of directors (including OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder) would suddenly oust Altman, claiming that he could no longer be trusted with the company’s mission of building artificial intelligence that “benefits people”. all humanity.”
The consequences were immediate. OpenAI President Greg Brockman, who also helped found the company eight years ago, resigned in protest.
The board had become increasingly frustrated with Altman’s behavior over the past year and thought it needed to be reined in, according to two people familiar with the board’s thinking. One episode, in particular, illustrated how strained the relationship between the board and Altman had become.
Both sides focused on an October research work co-written by Helen Toner, OpenAI board member and director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging technology.
Altman complained to Toner that the newspaper seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its technologies secure while praising a rival. He maintained that “any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight,” he wrote in an email to his colleagues.
Toner defended the paper as academic research, but Altman and other OpenAI leaders, including Sutskever, later discussed whether she should be removed from the board, a person involved in the talks said.
But Sutskever, who worries that ai could one day destroy humanity, unexpectedly sided with Toner and two other board members: Adam D’Angelo, CEO of the question-and-answer site Quora, and Tasha McCauley, a senior associate scientist at the RAND Corporation.
During a video call Friday, Sutskever read Altman a statement that said Altman was being fired because he was not “consistently truthful in his communications with the board.”
For the next five days, Altman and his allies pressured the junta to bring him back and for the junta to resign. On Sunday, he and company executives negotiated at OpenAI’s offices. Early in the afternoon, a delivery man with a dozen drinks from the Boba Guys chain arrived on a motorcycle to the street with two bags. Then a second delivery man appeared.
That night, talks broke down and the board named Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear as interim CEO.
But Microsoft offered a plan B: hire Altman to run a new ai research lab for Microsoft with Brockman. OpenAI executives orchestrated a letter from employees saying they would follow Altman to Microsoft if he was not reinstated. More than 700 of OpenAI’s 770 employees signed, including Sutskever, who said in a post on X that he “deeply regretted” his role in Altman’s overthrow.
The pressure made other board members balk, three people familiar with their thinking said. They were dismayed that Altman and his allies were fomenting a riot and wondered if it might be illegal because the employees had a contractual obligation to the company, not its CEO. And they thought that, as a board of directors, they were acting with integrity and fulfilling their obligation to the nonprofit’s mission.
The board was still determined to force Altman to change his behavior, two people familiar with the board’s deliberations said. She was also concerned about some of his recent efforts to raise money for personal interests, such as a drug development startup, at the same time he was raising money for OpenAI.
Conversations from Saturday to Tuesday focused on how to create a board that everyone could trust. For current members, that meant finding directors who would check Altman’s power and press for an independent investigation into his behavior.
While Microsoft supported Altman’s return to OpenAI, the company worked on backup plans, a person familiar with the matter said. Microsoft employees began preparing offer letters and searching for immigration attorneys for OpenAI staff on work visas, the person said.
OpenAI’s three board members spent most of Tuesday on Google Meet video calls, discussing the board’s options. They spoke several times with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, one of these people said.
Altman’s allies offered a list of board members consisting of D’Angelo, Summers and Bret Taylor, a seasoned Silicon Valley executive. Taylor, who will be chairman of the new board, oversaw the $44 billion sale of Twitter to Elon Musk when he led Twitter’s board last year.
Mr. Taylor and Ms. McCauley did not respond to requests for comment. No one involved in the discussions has explained how Summers became an option, and he did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
But he has recently established himself as an authority on artificial intelligence and economics. Mr. Summers has He warned that ChatGPT will come for the “cognitive class,” changing the way doctors make diagnoses, editors work on books, and Wall Street traders invest. He has also served on the boards of other technology companies, including financial services company Block, formerly known as Square.
The board viewed Summers as an independent thinker with enough management experience to hold his own against Altman, two of the people familiar with the negotiations said.
Tuesday night, they had a deal. Thanksgiving helped. Despite all their disagreements, they all agreed that the chaos should not extend into Thursday, one person said.
But there is still a lot of work to do. Over the next six months, the board will analyze and potentially change OpenAI’s unusual structure, one of these people said.
After the decision to bring Altman back, OpenAI workers filled employee Slack channels with heart emojis and images of a frog, known as a “frog,” which has become an unofficial corporate mascot, three employees said.
On Tuesday night, employees gathered at the company office to drink boba tea, an internal reference to news coverage over the weekend. Brockman posted a selfie with dozens of smiling workers in the office around midnight.
The title read: “We’re back.”
Erin Griffith and Yiwen Lu contributed with reports.
