Sam Altman has been fired from OpenAI, Inc., the 501(c)(3) nonprofit that serves as the governing body for OpenAI, the AI startup behind ChatGPT, DALL-E 3, GPT-4, and other AI systems High capacity obstetrics. . He will leave the company’s board of directors and step down as CEO.
in mail On the official OpenAI blog, the company wrote that Altman’s departure follows a “deliberative board review process” that concluded that Altman “was not always forthright in his communications” with other board members, “which hindered his ability to exercise his responsibilities.”
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“The council no longer trusts him [Altman’s] “The ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” the blog post said.
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Altman wrote that he “loved his time at OpenAI” and would have “more to say about what comes next.”
The dramatic change in OpenAI’s leadership will also see Greg Brockman — who was a member of the team that co-founded OpenAI, as was Altman — step down as chairman but will remain chairman of OpenAI, reporting to the company’s newly appointed interim CEO. Mira Moratti. Moratti was previously CTO at OpenAI.
OpenAI says it will begin a formal search for a permanent CEO immediately.
“OpenAI was intentionally designed to advance our mission: ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” the board wrote in a joint statement. “The Board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As a leader of the company’s research, product and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to serve as President “We have every confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI through this transition period.”
The OpenAI Board of Directors now consists of OpenAI’s Chief Scientist, Ilya Sutskever; Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo; Tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Altman’s dismissal comes unexpectedly, to say the least. Last week, the company hosted its first developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, which Altman convenes. Altman spoke at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference and event in Oakland, California, on Thursday. And According to To the edge And The New York Times, citing multiple internal sources, said OpenAI employees learned of Altman’s firing when it was publicly announced.
Altman has a long history of guiding OpenAI. After co-founding the company alongside Peter Thiel, LinkedIn co-founder Reed Hoffman and others, Altman, who previously headed startup accelerator Y Combinator and also holds a seat on the board of Worldcoin, the ambitious cryptocurrency project, initially served as co-chairman of OpenAI alongside Elon Musk. Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla.
Over the past few months, Altman has played an active role in trying to shape regulators’ responses to AI, appearing at US Congressional hearings and meeting in person with world leaders including President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and French President Emmanuel Macron, among others. International political tour.
It’s unclear what mistakes Altman may have made in leading OpenAI…at present. But it clearly has to do with his relationship with the somewhat unusual makeup of OpenAI’s board and corporate governance structure — and perhaps OpenAI’s active talks of raising significant new capital.
As a recent piece on VentureBeat explorationOpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI Global, LLC, is entirely controlled by the non-profit organization OpenAI. While the for-profit affiliate is allowed to commercialize its technology, it is subject to the nonprofit’s mission: to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can — as OpenAI defines it — “outperform.” Humans are in the most economically valuable work.
The nonprofit OpenAI’s board of directors has the ability to determine when a company has achieved AGI and to exclude that AGI from intellectual property licenses and other commercial terms, including with Microsoft, one of the largest investors in OpenAI and a consistent integrator of various OpenAI technologies.
Microsoft has pumped $13 billion into OpenAI so far and has up to a 49% stake in the company. The former’s share price fell by more than 1% in the last 30 minutes of trading, after Altman’s departure was announced. Axios Reports Microsoft was notified that Altman would be leaving “minutes” before the public announcement.
OpenAI was founded as a non-profit in 2015, but was restructured in 2019 to become a for-profit company to raise capital — an acknowledgment of the huge costs associated with training cutting-edge AI systems. In emphasizing this point, Altman said in an article: interview This week he told the Financial Times that he was “hopeful” Microsoft would increase its investment to help pay for the looming “huge” model training costs.
When contacted via email, OpenAI press relations declined to comment beyond the official blog post. But Microsoft PR provided this statement from Frank Shaw, chief communications officer: “We have a long-standing partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and their team as we deliver this next era of AI to our customers.”
Nadella later published A statement:
“As you saw in Microsoft Ignite this week, we continue to innovate rapidly for this age of AI, with more than 100 announcements across the full technology stack from AI systems, models, and tools in Azure to Copilot. Most importantly, we are committed to delivering all of this to our customers while Building for the future. We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda and exciting product roadmap; we remain committed to our partnership, to Mira and the team. Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world.