I am returning to OpenAI as CEO. Mira will return to her role as CTO. The new board will consist of Bret Taylor (Chairman), Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo.
I’ve never been so excited about the future. I am extremely grateful to everyone for their hard work in an unclear and unprecedented situation and believe our resilience and spirit sets us apart in the industry. I feel very good about our chances of success in achieving our mission.
Before I get to what comes next, I would like to say thank you.
I love and respect Ilya, I think he is a role model in this field and a gem of a person. I have no animosity towards him. Even though Ilya will no longer serve on the board, we hope to continue our collaboration and discuss how he can continue his work at OpenAI.
I am grateful to Adam, Tasha and Helen for working with us to reach this solution that best serves our mission. I look forward to continuing to work with Adam and am sincerely grateful to Helen and Tasha for putting so much effort into this process.
Many thanks also to Emmett, who played an important and constructive role in achieving this result. Emmett’s commitment to AI safety and balancing stakeholder interests was clear.
Mira has done a great job through it all, selflessly serving the mission, the team and the company throughout. She is an incredible leader and OpenAI wouldn’t be OpenAI without her. Thank you very much.
Greg and I are partners in running this company. We’ve never quite figured out how to communicate this on the org chart, but we’ll get there. In the meantime, I just wanted to clarify. Thank you for everything you have done from the beginning and for how you have handled things from the beginning and in the last few days.
The leadership team – Mira, Brad, Jason, Che, Hannah, Diane, Anna, Bob, Srinivas, Matt, Lilian, Miles, Jan, Wojciech, John, Jonathan, Pat and many more – are clearly ready to run the company without staff Me. It is said that one way to judge a CEO is how he selects and trains his potential successors. In this regard, I’m doing much better than I thought. It is clear to me that the company is in good hands and I hope this is clear to everyone. Thank you all.
Jakub, Szymon and Aleksander are exceptional talents and I am so glad that they have joined forces again to advance us and our research. Thank you very much.
To all of you, our team: I’m sure books will be written about this time and I hope the first thing they say is how great the entire team was. After getting through all of this, we didn’t lose a single employee. They stood steadfastly toward each other, this company, and our mission. One of the most important things for the team building AGI safely is the ability to handle stressful and uncertain situations and always use good judgment. Top marks. Thank you all.
Satya, Kevin, Amy and Brad have been incredible partners throughout and had exactly the right priorities from the start. They had our back and were ready to welcome us all if we couldn’t achieve our primary goal. We clearly made the right decision to work with Microsoft and I am pleased that they will join our new board as a non-voting observer. Thank you very much.
We thank our partners and users for staying loyal to us. We really felt the outpouring of support and love and it helped us all get through this. The fact that we haven’t lost a single customer will motivate us to work even harder for you and we are all looking forward to getting back to work.
Will Hurd, Brian Chesky, Bret Taylor and Larry Summers put their lives on hold and did incredible things to support the mission. I don’t know how they did it so well, but they really did. Thank you very much.
Ollie also put his life on hold the entire time to just do whatever he could to help, in addition to his usual unconditional love and support. Thank you and I love you.
What’s next?
We have three immediate priorities.
● Advancing our research plan and further investing in our comprehensive security efforts, which have always been critical to our work. Our research roadmap is clear; That was a wonderfully concentrating time. I share the excitement you all feel. We will turn this crisis into an opportunity! I’ll work on it with Mira.
● Continuously improving and providing our products and supporting our customers. It is important that people experience the benefits and promise of AI and have the opportunity to help shape it. We continue to believe that great products are the best way to achieve this. I will work with Brad, Jason and Anna to ensure our unwavering commitment is demonstrated to users, customers, partners and governments around the world.
● Bret, Larry and Adam will work very hard on the critically important task of building a board with diverse perspectives, improving our governance structure and overseeing an independent review of recent events. I look forward to working closely with them on these critical steps so that everyone can have confidence in the stability of OpenAI.
I really look forward to finishing the work with all of you to build a beneficial AGI – the best team in the world, the best mission in the world.
Kind regards, Sam