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Sam Altman's sudden (and forced) departure caused chaos at OpenAI
"Mr. Altman's departure is the result of a prudent review by the board of directors, which determined that he had not been consistently open in communication, which hindered his ability to fulfill his responsibilities," the statement said. “The board no longer trustsÄ in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI."
This is a short message from the board of directors of OpenAI, which a few days ago fired its director and the face of artificial intelligence for the past year. Last year, Altman himself turned OpenAI from a "garage" into a company worth 90 billion. Obviously, there was more going on behind the scenes than was initially revealed, because Altman is not the only victim.
Even more have left
After the sudden ouster of Sam Altman as CEO, the company has now left even more leading researchers and managers. External investors also came forward and made quite substantial investments in the company. They rightly wonder if they should be concerned. It is increasingly obvious that it was an internal coup, and the main target was Altman.
Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder and chairman, resigned in protest hours after Sam Altman was fired by the company's board of directors. Brockman later released details of Altman's removal, suggesting that the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, orchestrated the effort to remove the CEO.
Brockman claims that he disclosed to Altman in advance that Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and a member of its board of directors, intended to fire him (along with other board members). More Company testimony indicates that the disagreement between Sutskever and Altman centered on the direction of the company, particularly its ability to safely build more powerful artificial intelligence technology.
"The board did its duty in accordance with the mission of our non-profit organization, which is to ensure that we build artificial intelligence that benefits wildlife," Sutskever is said to have told employees at The Information, according to a report by The Information. extraordinary meeting.
Noticing signs of a deepening internal crisis, Jakub Pachocki, principal researcher of the GPT-4 language model, and Aleksander Madry, an MIT professor hired by Altman to work on artificial intelligence security, also reportedly left. , and Szymon Sidor, a researcher who worked on a branch of artificial intelligence known as reinforcement learning.
Microsoft also announced, investing 13 billion dollars in OpenAI. The news was unexpected, board members are worried, and CEO Satya Nadella is said to be furious, according to Bloomberg.
Altman hosted a developer conference earlier this month and revealed plans to create an AI app store and develop a company that could compete with Nvidia in the field of chip development.
Due to disagreements regarding the issue of prioritizing the safe development of artificial intelligence, several prominent researchers from OpenAI left the company and founded a rival company, Anthropic.
Altman told the APEC CEO Summit in San Francisco last week that the company is making progress on developing a more powerful successor to the GPT-4. »Šfour times in the history of OpenAI – most recently in the past few weeks – I was able to be in the room as we pushed back the veil of ignorance and pushed the frontiers of discovery forward," he said.
Although it was possible until a few days ago that Altman would return to the position of director, the whole plan fell flat. He will be replaced by the former head of Twitter, Emmett Shear. What Altman will do now is not known. Is OpenAI afraid it could create a potential competitor? Perhaps, but Altman has a lot of work to do to catch up with the giant he helped create.
