Sam Altman and OpenAI aren’t going to change or lose: What’s happening in the corporate world after the kickstarter?
Altman’s firing caught investors off guard, including prominent firms such as Khosla Ventures, which has a significant stake in OpenAI, as well as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which have smaller slices of shares, according to two people familiar with the matter not authorized to speak to media about the startup. The spokespeople for each of the companies declined to comment.
An attempt to restore Altman as CEO and replace the board ran into difficulty Sunday over the role of existing directors in choosing their replacements, Bloomberg reported.
Nathan Benaich, general partner of Air Street Capital and coauthor of the “State of AI Report,” says OpenAI’s corporate structure has proven to be at odds with the need to support cutting-edge research through huge amounts of equity investment. He said that it was an experiment to defy the laws of corporate physics.
When Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other investors formed the startup behind ChatGPT as a US not-for-profit organization in 2015, Altman told Vanity Fair he had very little experience with nonprofits. He said that he was not sure how it would go.
The Openai Board of Directors: It’s All Yours: OpenAI Will Lead the Way in AI Safety, AI Governance, and AI Safety
Openai employees sign a letter accusing the company’s board of endangering their work and undermining them. They reject the notion that OpenAI was pushing too quickly without regard for safety. “Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms,” they write.
Microsoft is able to acquire one of the most successful management teams in artificial intelligence without buying the company because of the chaos at the top.
“OpenAI’s stability and success are too important to allow turmoil to disrupt them like this,” says Shear. “I will endeavor to address the key concerns as well, although in many cases I believe it may take longer than a month to achieve true progress.”
Separately, OpenAI’s board announced it has hired former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear to lead the company, naming him the interim CEO despite calls from some OpenAI investors to bring back Altman.
After 3 a.m. on Monday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made an announcement saying that he would be joining the company in a post on X.
Nadella also said Greg Brockman, the former president of OpenAI who quit in protest after Altman’s sudden departure, would be joining the new AI division at Microsoft alongside Altman.
OpenAI, founded by Altman, Elon Musk and others about eight years ago as a nonprofit AI research lab, released ChatGPT last year, setting the pace for the entire tech industry’s focus on a sophisticated type of artificial intelligence known as generative AI.
Microsoft still has a “multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, rumored to be worth around $10 billion. Microsoft is the cloud partner for OpenAI, which means that their cloud services power all Openai workload across products and services.
Benaich, Benadela, And Justin.tv: The OpenAI OpenAI Founder And CEO: A Conversation With Benaach
“Satya now looks like one of the most epic kingmakers,” says Nathan Benaich, founder and general partner at Air Street Capital and author of the State of AI report.
The chief scientist at the company and member of the board, who has been accused of coordinating the coup against Altman, are among those who signed the letter.
Nadela made it clear that there was a door open for any Openai employees who wanted to leave, noting that they would receive resources needed for their success.
Shear was one of the four founding partners of Justin.tv. In June of 2011. the site moved its gaming content to its new platform, giving it the go-ahead to host millions of monthly streamers. Amazon bought the company for $1 billion in 2014.
According to one senior employee who worked with Shear for many years, he was a typical Silicon Valley engineer. Highly intelligent and socially awkward. Shear was not the best communicator, the senior Twitch employee says, and he benefited from having a lot of experienced people around him. “He could be very blunt,” they add.
Several of Shear’s old posts on X have been shared on social media since the OpenAI board announced his appointment. In one, he discussed the prevalence of rape fantasies; in another, he offers that while “Nazis were very evil,” there are scenarios worse than a Nazi takeover. Shear didn’t reply to a request for comment.