2023-11-22 14:10:43
The biggest technological soap opera of the year has come to an end. Five days after his dismissal, Sam Altman has returned to his position as CEO of OpenAI, the firm behind that conversational monster powered by artificial intelligence (AI) called ChatGPT. This was announced by the emerging company itself in a brief statement published on its X account, a social network formerly known as Twitter.
Altman returns to the firm he helped found in 2015 with its president Greg Brockman, who left his position in the company last Friday in protest against the dismissal of the CEO. Both of them do so reinforced and in close communion with the workers, who quickly closed ranks with their boss, and with the investors, who, everything indicates, will begin to have a much greater weight in the decisions that, in the future, are made in the within the company.
If you have gotten lost in this story, which would not be surprising, here you can find all the keys that have led to Altman’s departure and subsequent return to OpenAI.
Why is Altman fired?
When OpenAI was born, it was with the intention of developing artificial intelligence solutions and making them available to the entire society. The business was on the back burner. In its founding letter, published in December 2015, the startup defined itself as “a research company,” but “without the limitations of the need to generate financial return«.
This all changed radically at the end of 2022, when ChatGPT was launched and third-party investment in the company began to increase exponentially. The objective was no longer just to help humanity, it was also necessary to do business and offer a certain return to those who had bet their money on the adventure.
However, several members of OpenAI’s board of directors were not comfortable with the rapid development of artificial intelligence. They considered that the ideal was to adopt a somewhat slower approach to prevent technology from ending up doing more harm than good to society. And that was, in the end, the reason why it was decided to fire Altman last Friday.
What role have investors played?
OpenAI has a valuation that is already around 90,000 million dollars. If it has reached this condition, and has been able to develop solutions such as ChatGPT or the DALL-E image generator, it has been thanks to the fact that the firm has been showered with billions of dollars from venture investors and firms like Microsoft. As soon as Altman’s dismissal was announced, investors began to move, and quickly, to pressure and get the executive to return to his position. They didn’t get it on the weekend, maybe because they needed a little more support. And this ended up arriving early Monday morning in the United States.
And the OpenAI workers?
«OpenAI is nothing without its people«. This was the mantra repeated by the employees of the AI firm on social networks just a few hours before it was learned that more than 700 company workers – representing more than 90% of its workforce – had threatened to leave their jobs if The board did not accept Altman’s return and he immediately resigned. They also threatened to meet with his former boss at Microsoft, where, in theory, he was going to be leading a new artificial intelligence laboratory.
And they were right, OpenAI is nothing without its people. Without this movement of workers, who were surely not going to have problems finding accommodation, whether at Microsoft or other companies, it is most likely that turning back would have been impossible.
¿Altman no se a Microsoft?
Microsoft has been the company that has invested the most in OpenAI and, evidently, also the one that has invested the most money in the startup. The two names are closely linked, and the parent company of Windows was not willing to lose the money invested or collapse on Wall Street on Monday as soon as the stock market opened.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, went ahead early Monday morning by announcing the signing of Altman and Brockman to lead a newly created AI laboratory. However, a few hours later he gave several interviews in which he left the door open for the executives to return to OpenAI. Be that as it may, the company was going to win and keep the talent.
What about the company’s board?
The board has evidently been beheaded. Of the four members who agreed to Altman’s departure, only one remains in office, and on an interim basis. That’s Adam D’Angelo, head of the social platform Quora. He has been joined in recent hours by Bret Taylor, who was CEO of the software company Salesforce and president of the board of directors of Twitter; and Larry Summers, who served as US Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton.
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