The conclusion of an investigation into Sam Altman's chaotic firing from OpenAI more than three months ago represented a resounding victory for the high-profile CEO as he tries to reassert control of the artificial intelligence company he helped create.
OpenAI, in a press conference on Friday, said Altman, who returned to OpenAI just five days after being ousted in November, did nothing to warrant his dismissal and would regain the only position at the company that still eluded him. him: a position on the company's board of directors.
Altman's dismissal shocked Silicon Valley and jeopardized the future of one of the tech industry's most influential startups. He also cast doubt on whether OpenAI, with or without Altman in charge, was ready to carry the flag for the tech industry's rabid focus on artificial intelligence.
When he returned to OpenAI in November, Altman did not regain his position on the board of directors although he agreed to an investigation into his behavior and the board's actions. Two members who voted in favor of his removal agreed to resign; His substitutes, outside the company, supervised the investigation carried out by the WilmerHale law firm. Bret Taylor, chairman of OpenAI's board of directors, said during the press conference that the long-awaited report on the episode was finished, but the company did not publish it.
The company said the law firm's report found that OpenAI's board of directors acted within its broad discretion to fire Mr. Altman, but also found that his conduct did not warrant dismissal.
“The special committee recommended and the full board expressed its full confidence in Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman,” Taylor said, referring to Greg Brockman, the company president who resigned in protest after Altman was ousted. “We are excited and unanimous in our support for Sam and Greg.”
OpenAI also took steps to address concerns about a lack of diversity on the board by adding three women as directors: Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, former general counsel at Sony; and Fidji Simo, CEO of Instacart.
Taylor, who was one of the replacements named to OpenAI's board of directors in November, said the board would continue to expand.
With the report and the additions to the board of directors, OpenAI leadership hoped to move past the controversy over Altman's ouster. The incident raised countless questions about his leadership and the San Francisco company's unusual structure: a nonprofit board overseeing a for-profit company.
But by not publishing the report, OpenAI left many unanswered questions about the company. Some experts have questioned whether Altman had too much control over how the investigation was handled.
“As we told researchers, deception, manipulation, and resistance to thorough oversight should be unacceptable,” Helen Toner and Tasha McCauley, the two OpenAI board members who left the company at the end, said in a statement. from last year. “We look forward to the new board doing its job of governing OpenAI and holding it accountable to the mission.”
Taylor appeared alongside Altman at Friday's press conference. After announcing the new board members, she said the review found that the previous board acted in good faith in removing Mr. Altman but did not anticipate the challenges that would arise from firing him.
“The review determined that the board's decision did not arise from a concern regarding product safety,” Mr. Taylor said. “It was simply a breach of trust between the board and Mr. Altman.”
After Taylor completed his prepared remarks, Altman praised the resilience of the firm and its partners during and after his ouster. “I'm glad this is all over,” he said.
OpenAI provided a six-paragraph summary of the report. He said WilmerHale reviewed 30,000 documents and conducted dozens of interviews, including with former OpenAI board members.
It found that the previous board was accurate in its justification and public explanation for firing Mr. Altman for not being “consistently truthful in his communications with the board.” He also said the board did not anticipate that his action would destabilize the company.
The company said WilmerHale gave oral briefings on the report, which will not be made public, to Mr. Taylor and Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary who was also added to the board in November.
Taylor said OpenAI had made several changes aimed at improving the way the company is run, including new governance guidelines for the board of directors, a new conflict of interest policy and a whistleblower hotline.
OpenAI's summary of the report did not provide information about concerns that the company's senior leaders raised with the previous board about Mr. Altman. Before his firing, Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI, and Mira Murati, chief technology officer at OpenAI, expressed concern about Altman's management style, including what was characterized as his history of manipulative behavior, The reported. New York Times.
Dr. Sutskever, through a lawyer, called those claims “false.” Ms. Murati said in a lazy company post Thursday that he shared with the board the same comments he had provided directly to Mr. Altman, but said he never approached the board to share those concerns.
“I am happy that the independent review has concluded and we can all move forward together,” Murati said Friday in a post on X, formerly called Twitter.
OpenAI is still being investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission over the board's actions and the possibility that Altman may have misled investors. Companies that hire outside law firms often turn the report over to public investigators upon completion. A spokeswoman for OpenAI's board of directors declined to say whether she would provide the report to the SEC.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December for copyright infringement of news content related to artificial intelligence systems.)
OpenAI, which was valued at more than $80 billion in its latest funding round, is at the forefront of generative ai, technologies that can generate text, images and sounds. Many believe that generative ai could transform the tech industry as profoundly as the web browser did some three decades ago. Others worry that the technology could cause serious harm, helping to spread misinformation online, replacing countless jobs, and perhaps even threatening the future of humanity.
After OpenAI launched the online chatbot ChatGPT in late 2022, Altman became the face of the industry's push toward generative ai. About a year later, the board unexpectedly fired him, saying it no longer had confidence in his ability to run the company.
The board of directors had been reduced to six people: three founders and three independent members. Along with the three outsiders, Dr. Sutskever, one of the founders of OpenAI, voted to remove Altman as CEO and chairman of the board, saying, without giving specific details, that he had not been “consistently sincere in his communications”.
Brockman, another founder, resigned from the company in protest. Days later, Dr. Sutskever said he regretted his decision to remove Mr. Altman and effectively resigned from the board, leaving three independent members in opposition to Mr. Altman.
OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, before Altman created a for-profit subsidiary three years later and raised $1 billion from Microsoft. The board of directors of the nonprofit, whose stated mission was to develop ai for the benefit of humanity, maintained full control over the new subsidiary. Investors, including Microsoft, had no legal say in who ran the company.
In an effort to resolve the turmoil and return Altman to the company, he and the board agreed to replace two members with Taylor, who is a former Salesforce executive. But Altman was not reinstated to the board. Mr. Taylor and Mr. Summers were accused of overseeing the investigation into Mr. Altman and his dismissal.
Microsoft, a close OpenAI partner, has an observer seat on the board, held by Dee Templeton, the company's vice president of technology and research partnerships. Microsoft on Friday declined to comment on the dashboard and the report.
The new board faced criticism from corporate governance experts for its lack of diversity. Taylor told The Times in November that he would round out the board by adding “diverse and qualified candidates” who would embody “the fullness of what this mission represents, which will encompass ai technology and security policy.”
Karen Weise contributed reporting.
