More from Turmoil at OpenAI: what’s next for the creator of ChatGPT?
Saturday evening, hours after we broke the news that Altman was being asked to return to OpenAI by the board that fired him, he posted the following on X: “i love the openai team so much.”
Then, a lot of OpenAI employees started reposting him with the heart emoji. I’ve been told by multiple sources that the action was meant to signal to the board who would leave OpenAI to follow Altman to a new company. “A very large portion of people were there because of Greg [Brockman, the now-resigned president] and Sam,” one source says.
Former (and future?) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been pitching custom, Nvidia-rivaling AI Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) chips, according to a report in The New York Times. He’s reportedly also sought funding from Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s founder, for his rumored Jony Ive AI hardware collaboration.
Today, Bloomberg reported that the TPU project is code-named “Tigris,” and that “a number of prominent venture firms,” including Microsoft, are ready to or interested in backing Altman’s future projects.
It has been a whirlwind couple of days. If you’re catching up, here’s a summary of the ongoing crisis at OpenAI:
• The company published a blog post Friday afternoon announcing that it had fired Altman as CEO and that board chair Greg Brockman was stepping down. The board said Altman hadn’t been candidly communicating with them.
• CTO Mira Murati was named interim CEO.
• Brockman later said “I quit.”
• Altman and Brockman posted a joint statement saying they were “shocked and saddened” by the board’s actions.
• Three high-level researchers reportedly quit in protest: Jakob Pachocki, Aleksander Madry, and Szymon Sidor.
• Sources said that Ilya Sutskever, Open AI’s chief scientist, was instrumental in Altman’s firing.
• Yesterday, sources told The Verge that OpenAI was trying to get Altman back as CEO.
• Altman has conditions, including that the board members who fired him quit. The board has been waffling and negotiations pushed past a key 5PM PT deadline on Saturday.
• The Verge heard there would be mass resignations if no deal was reached by 5PM PT. A deal didn’t happen, and the talks are continuing today.
• OpenAI is “optimistic” it can get Altman back. A memo to staff last night said an update is expected this morning.
We’d heard there was a threat of mass resignations at 5PM PT. Then OpenAI employees began mass-quote-tweeting Sam Altman saying he loved them with heart emojis, leading everyone to assume he indeed was coming back as CEO. But it’s still not a done deal, and we still don’t know exactly what all that meant. What we do know is that talks appear to be done for today, so we’re going to bed, Las Vegas Grand Prix be damned. We’ll try this all again tomorrow.
Big update to our scoop from earlier: a key 5PM PT deadline for the OpenAI board to strike a deal to resign and Sam Altman to return has passed, and mass resignations at OpenAI may come soon, unless this thing gets done.
OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO
Along with the news from Alex Heath and Nilay Patel that OpenAI’s board is in discussions with just-fired CEO Sam Altman about his return, now Bloomberg reports that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella “has been in touch with Altman and pledged to support him in whatever steps he takes next.”
The Wall Street Journal writes that Microsoft (the nonprofit’s primary financial backer) and Thrive Capital (its second-largest shareholder) are “ helping orchestrate the efforts” to restore Altman.
And according to this report by Forbes, the plan some investors are considering is to make the board consider the situation “untenable through a combination of mass revolt by senior researchers, withheld cloud computing credits from Microsoft, and a potential lawsuit from investors.”
OpenAI board in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO
The Information reported today that, fresh off being forced out of OpenAI, Sam Altman is spreading the word among investors that he has a new project in the works, possibly with the company’s former president, Greg Brockman.
Not long ago, rumors said Altman and Jony Ive would partner on an “iPhone of Artificial Intelligence” project, but later he said whatever ideas he has are “very nascent.”
[The Information]
That’s according to a memo Axios saw that chief operating officer Brad Lightcap sent out. Lightcap ruled out some of the possible reasons why Altman was let go:
“We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in response to malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices. This was a breakdown in communication between Sam and the board.”
After OpenAI announced Altman’s firing, company president Greg Brockman quit, as did three senior researchers.
The Information has the story. The outlet says Research director Jakub Pachocki, AI risk evaluation head Aleksander Madry, and longtime researcher Szymon Sidor resigned following Sam Altman’s surprise firing yesterday.
The article notes that Pachocki and Sidor had worked with Greg Brockman (who also left the company yesterday) on OpenAI’s Dota 2-playing AI bot, while Madry joined the company in May 2023, later forming a team to mitigate AI risks.
[The Information]
Former OpenAI president and chair Greg Brockman’s post on X tells his version of the events that pushed Sam Altman out of OpenAI (Altman reshared the post, and put up a message that today “has been sorta like reading your own eulogy while you’re still alive”).
According to Brockman, OpenAI Chief Scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever texted Altman on Thursday night asking to talk at noon on Friday (November 17th). At noon, on a Google Meet call with Sutskever, as well as non-employee board members Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner, “Ilya told Sam he was being fired and that the news was going out very soon.”
Within minutes, Sutskever invited Brockman to a Google Meet call where he was informed of his removal from the board “...and that Sam had been fired. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post.”
The former CEO was suddenly fired by OpenAI’s board on Friday, and in a post on X, he gave no details on what happened but said he’ll “have more to say about what’s next later.”
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