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An employee revolt at OpenAI has put pressure on directors of the world’s leading artificial intelligence company to bring back ousted chief executive Sam Altman after a botched boardroom coup.
A letter to the board signed Monday by more than 500 of OpenAI’s 770 employees said directors “undermined our mission and our company” by firing Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman on Friday.
After failed talks to reinstate Altman on Sunday, in which he demanded the board’s resignation as the price for his return, Microsoft announced it had hired the 38-year-old entrepreneur and Brockman to head a new AI division.
Still, Altman indicated Monday that he believes OpenAI is here to stay and that he is working with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to secure the startup’s future.
Their top priority is to ensure OpenAI continues to thrive, Altman posted on [and] The partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft makes this very feasible.” It’s “one team, one mission,” he said.
The hundreds of OpenAI employees who signed the letter said they had been offered positions in the new unit at Microsoft, the software company that is also OpenAI’s largest investor, and that they “will take this step immediately, unless all of them do.” current board members and the board resign.” appoint two new senior independent directors.”
The counter-coup had already secured the support of one of the four remaining board members. Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist at AI, initially signed the employees’ letter go on social media to apologize for his role in Altman’s firing.
Read the open lettersigned by more than 500,770 OpenAI employees
“I deeply regret my involvement in the board’s actions,” he wrote on X. “I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we have built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
The other remaining directors are Adam D’Angelo, Quora’s chief executive; technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner of the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Some of OpenAI’s most prominent venture capital investors held out hope that Altman would return. The company’s board made a “serious misjudgment,” early OpenAI supporter Vinod Khosla wrote in a scathing editorial in The Information on Monday. “Every problem has a solution,” Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner wrote on X.
Thrive is said to be the lead buyer in a sale of OpenAI employees’ shares that was expected to close in the coming weeks. That sale, a chance for employees to benefit from OpenAI’s success by selling to investors, was expected to include up to $1 billion in shares and give the company a valuation of $86 billion, people said Knowledge of the plans.
The stock sale is now in limbo because the weekend drama represents a significant change in circumstances, but could still go ahead as planned if Altman returns, according to a person familiar with the situation.
OpenAI’s release of the chatbot ChatGPT a year ago sparked an AI boom that attracted billions of dollars in investments and spawned dozens of startups.
ChatGPT uses so-called generative AI to respond to text, voice or image prompts – a technological leap considered by many in Silicon Valley to be the most significant since the advent of the smartphone.
The exact reason for Altman’s removal remains unclear. OpenAI’s board said only that it had not been “consistently open.”
His departure was due to concerns about his commitment to OpenAI’s mission to ensure safe and useful AI, according to people familiar with the matter.
A person with direct knowledge of the board’s decision said it had “become impossible to monitor” the co-founder.
“There wasn’t a big problem,” the person added. “The board got to the point where they couldn’t believe what Sam was telling them.”
After talks with Altman failed on Sunday, the OpenAI board named Emmett Shear, co-founder of the video streaming service Twitch, as interim chief.
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Shear, who has publicly called for slower adoption of AI, sought to quell reports that a dispute over security was part of the dispute. “The board *didn’t* remove Sam because of a specific safety disagreement,” he wrote on X. “I’m not crazy enough to take this job without the board’s support for commercializing our great models.”
Nadella said his company remains committed to its partnership with OpenAI and looks forward to “getting to know and working with Emmett Shear and OpenAI’s new leadership team.”
Microsoft has committed more than $10 billion in capital and infrastructure loans to OpenAI – although not all of the capital has been called – and has embedded OpenAI’s powerful generative AI tools into its own software.
Shares of Microsoft rose more than 2 percent on Monday, recouping losses late Friday following the announcement of Altman’s firing.
Altman told the Financial Times this month that he intends to raise additional investment from the Seattle group beyond the previous tranche of money, saying he has a “great partner” in Microsoft.