More details of Sam Altman’s sudden ousting as CEO of OpenAI have emerged, with several senior researchers quitting the company, and executives and investors from across the industry expressing shock and confusion at what is increasingly being perceived as a board coup.
Hours after Sam Altman was booted from the company by its board, Greg Brockman, another OpenAI cofounder and the company’s chairman, quit in protest. Brockman later posted details of Altman’s removal suggesting that the company’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, had orchestrated the effort to remove the CEO.
Brockman’s post claimed that Altman was told he was being fired by Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board. Several accounts from inside the company suggest that a disagreement between Sutskever and Altman centered around the company’s direction, and specifically its ability to build more capable AI technology safety.
“This was the board doing its duty to the mission of the nonprofit, which is to make sure that OpenAI builds AGI that benefits all of humanity,” Sutskever told employees at an emergency all-hands on Friday afternoon, according to a report in The Information.
Jakub Pachocki, a lead research on OpenAI’s groundbreaking language model GPT-4; Aleksander Madry, a professor at MIT recruited by Altman to work on AI safety; and Szymon Sidor, a researcher who has worked on a branch of AI known as reinforcement learning, all reportedly quit as the crisis deepened.
The fallout from Sam Alman’s firing as CEO of OpenAI has shaken the tech industry, and threatens to turn into a backlash against the remaining board.
Executives at Microsoft, which has invested a reported $13 billion in OpenAI, were said to be “blindsided” by news of Altman’s exit, and Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, was furious, Bloomberg reports.
OpenAI declined to provide further comment on the situation. Neither Altman, Brockman, nor Sutskever responded to requests for comment. Inquiries sent to the three researchers who quit also went unanswered.
Altman had led OpenAI on an incredible run of success starting with the launch of ChatGPT less than a year ago. He quickly became a figurehead for the generative AI boom, and he was courted by world leaders keen to learn about the remarkable potential—and the potential dangers—of more advanced AI.
Read the full article here
