Sam Altman's sudden (and forced) departure caused chaos at OpenAI

"Mr. Altman's departure is the result of a prudent review by the board of directors, which determined that he had not been consistently open in communication, which hindered his ability to perform his responsibilities," the statement said. "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI."

This is a short message from the board of directors of OpenAI, which a few days ago fired its director and the face of artificial intelligence for the past year. Altman himself turned OpenAI from a "garage" into a $90 billion company last year. Apparently, however, there was more going on behind the scenes than was initially revealed, as Altman is not the only victim.

More have left

Following the sudden ouster of Sam Altman as CEO, several more senior researchers and executives have now left the company. External investors also came forward, making quite substantial investments in the company. They rightly wonder if they should be concerned. It is increasingly clear that it was an internal coup, and Altman was the main target.

Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder and chairman, resigned in protest hours after Sam Altman was ousted by the company's board of directors. Brockman later released details of Altman's removal, suggesting that the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, orchestrated the effort to remove the CEO.

Brockman claims he disclosed to Altman ahead of time that Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and a member of its board, planned to fire him (along with other board members). Several testimonies from the company suggest that the disagreement between Sutskever and Altman centered on the company's direction, particularly its ability to safely build more powerful AI technology.

"The board has done its duty in accordance with the mission of our nonprofit organization, which is to ensure that we build artificial intelligence that benefits humanity," Sutskever reportedly told employees at a special meeting, according to The Information.

Noticing signs of a deepening internal crisis, Jakub Pachocki, principal researcher of the GPT-4 language model, Aleksander Madry, an MIT professor hired by Altman to work on AI security, and Szymon Sidor, a researcher, also reportedly left. , who worked on a branch of artificial intelligence known as reinforcement learning.

Microsoft also came forward, investing $13 billion in OpenAI. The news was unexpected, board members are worried, and CEO Satya Nadella is said to be quite furious, according to Bloomberg.

Earlier this month, Altman hosted a developer conference and revealed plans to create an AI-powered app store and develop a company that could compete with Nvidia in chip development.

Disagreements over the issue of prioritizing secure AI development have previously led several prominent OpenAI researchers to leave the company to found rival Anthropic.

Altman told the APEC CEO Summit in San Francisco last week that the company is making progress on developing a more powerful successor to the GPT-4. “Four times in the history of OpenAI—most recently in the past few weeks—I've been able to be in the room as we pushed back the veil of ignorance and pushed the frontiers of discovery forward,” he said.

Although it was possible until a few days ago that Altman would return to the position of director, the whole plan apparently fell through the cracks. He will be replaced by ex-Twitter head Emmett Shear. What Altman will do now is not known. Is OpenAI afraid it could create a strong competitor? Perhaps, but Altman has a lot of work ahead of him to catch up with the giant he helped create.