ChatGPT creator and OpenAI CEO fired, kicked out of the board!

ChatGPT Founder and OpenAI CEO Dismissed and Excluded from the Board!

Too sudden! Altman, the number one figure in the AI industry and the father of ChatGPT, is out!

Last Friday afternoon, OpenAI released a blockbuster news on its official blog. 38-year-old Sam Altman was relieved of his position as CEO and board member.

Sam Altman

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The company’s Chief Technology Officer, Mira Murati, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately. OpenAI will continue to search for a formal successor to the CEO position.

CTO Mira Murati

The official announcement was ruthless:

“Altman’s departure was the conclusion reached by the board after careful review. He was not honest in his communication with the board, which hindered the board’s ability to fulfill its duties. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to lead OpenAI.”

OpenAI has done a great job of keeping things under wraps. According to The Verge, citing multiple internal sources, even the employees of OpenAI only found out about this news when the announcement was made! Bloomberg reported that Altman was still sending emails to employees in the morning of the same day.

Greg Brockman, co-founder of OpenAI and former chairman of the board, will also step down from his position but will remain as President of OpenAI.

The current board of OpenAI is composed of Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist of OpenAI; Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora; Tasha McCauley, tech entrepreneur; and Helen Toner, Director of Strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

Unexpected dismissal

Altman’s dismissal comes as a surprise, as he has long been considered a spokesperson in the field of AI.

Eight years ago, Altman co-founded OpenAI and initially served as co-chairman of the company with Elon Musk. Musk left the company in 2018 to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla. Since then, he has founded his own AI company, xAI. In this process, OpenAI has grown from a small nonprofit organization to a multi-billion-dollar company at a record-setting pace.

Last year, OpenAI released ChatGPT, a chatbot capable of generating human-like text, becoming one of the most transformative products in technological history. The company stated in November that around 100 million people use ChatGPT weekly, with over 90% of Fortune 500 companies building tools on OpenAI’s platform. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI provides software to businesses and is projected to have an annual revenue of approximately $1 billion.

The company recently held its first developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, hosted by Altman. Altman spoke at an event in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum and in Oakland, California last Thursday.

Altman personally responded to the news of his departure on social media:

“I enjoyed my time at OpenAI, which has been transformative for me personally, and I hope also for the world. Most importantly, I loved working with these talented people. We will talk more about what’s next later.”

With no long-term leader or public spokesperson, both insiders and outsiders are curious about OpenAI’s future.

Pieter Abbeel, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of an AI startup, served as a research scientist at OpenAI in 2016 and 2017. He told Bloomberg that he was “completely confused” when he heard Altman was fired and said, “If it wasn’t for Sam, GPT-4 wouldn’t exist, and that’s kind of insane.”

Some Speculations

It’s currently unclear what mistakes Altman might have made while leading OpenAI, but it could be related to OpenAI’s unique board of directors and corporate governance structure.

VentureBeat recently reported that OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC, is fully controlled by OpenAI’s nonprofit organization. While the for-profit subsidiary is allowed to commercialize its technology, it must adhere to the nonprofit organization’s mission of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) or, according to OpenAI’s definition, “outperforming humans at nearly every economically valuable work.”

The nonprofit organization’s board of directors has the power to determine when the company achieves AGI and exclude that AGI from IP licensing and other commercial terms, including its collaboration with Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s major investors.

But since a consensus on the definition of AGI has yet to be reached, what does it mean for a nonprofit board to decide whether to achieve AGI – for OpenAI and the world as a whole? And what timing and context for the decisions that may be made mean for its largest investor, Microsoft?

This week, Altman told the Financial Times that he “hoped” Microsoft would increase its investment to help cover the “huge” imminent costs of model training.

As Altman departs, OpenAI is actively negotiating to raise a large amount of new capital.

According to informants cited by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is discussing the possibility of selling stocks, which would increase the company’s valuation from $29 billion to $80-90 billion. Employees will be allowed to sell existing stocks rather than the company issuing new stocks.

Industry insiders also see this as a normal executive change. Forrester Senior Analyst Rowan Curran, responsible for generative AI and machine learning, stated that the decision by the board to remove CEO Altman should be seen as similar to other executive changes in the tech industry.

He said, “Sam Altman has clearly been a force behind OpenAI and has made significant contributions to the company’s development, but given what we know so far, there is currently no reason to believe that the company, its technology, or its methods have any underlying issues.”

Microsoft, which has invested $10 billion in OpenAI, saw its stock price drop by 2.4% due to Altman’s departure. In a statement, the company said, “We have a long-standing partnership with OpenAI, and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and its team, bringing the next era of AI to our customers.”

Author: LianGuaiBitpushNews Mary Liu

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