Less than a week after Ouster, Sam Altman returns to OpenAI as CEO; New board appointed

Sam Altman will return to OpenAI as CEO under a new board, the tech startup announced early Wednesday morning. The news comes less than a week after Altman was abruptly ousted last Friday. On Sunday night, he moved to Microsoft to lead a new group investigating artificial intelligence.

Earlier this week, more than 500 OpenAI employees attended sent a letter to the board and said they would resign and join the new Microsoft group unless Altman and president, chairman and co-founder Greg Brockman were reinstated and a new board formed.

ChatGPT owner OpenAI’s new board now includes former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora co-founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo.

In a post on Thank you for your patience.”

Altman followed up with his own X-Post discussing the rapid changes:

And Brockman said he would “start programming again tonight.”

When Altman’s move to Microsoft was announced late Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted that the company “remains committed to OpenAI,” in which it acquired a 49% stake.

Today, Nadella praised the changes at OpenAI, writing, “We believe this is an essential first step toward more robust, informed, and efficient governance.”

Before Altman’s sudden departure, OpenAI was in talks to raise a new round of funding worth $80 billion that would make the company one of the most valuable startups in history.

Released about a year ago, the latest version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot has brought the conversation about generative AI from the lab to the living room. Students working on theses, professionals developing presentations, and millions of others suddenly had easy access to a variety of resources, albeit with significant strings attached. As OpenAI’s valuation soared and Altman and other ChatGPT advocates saw its potential to increase efficiency and speed up cumbersome processes in areas like healthcare and other parts of society, some painted a very bleak picture. A group of tech leaders, including Elon Musk, called for a pause in AI development earlier this year pending a more thorough study of the potential for harm.

While there are no doomsday scenarios in which nuclear codes and machines freeze out their human creators, the issue of copyright has raised alarms in the creative community. AI has been a key priority for both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA in the Hollywood guilds’ recent attacks on the AMPTP. ChatGPT is trained to create text and images by inputting material. Copyright holders of these works have expressed concern that the system undermines the value of their works.