On Nov. 17, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, until then the Chief Technology Officer (CTO), was appointed to serve as interim CEO. The board claims to have made this decision in a “deliberative review process,” deciding that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
As of right now, it is not known to the public exactly what Altman did — no public scandal preempted the board’s action. It could have been a conflict on AI safety issues. Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap said that the board’s move “took us all by surprise” in an internal memo. On X, Altman reminisced about his time at the company, adding that he “will have more to say about what’s next later.” The Verge reported that the board was in talks to bring Altman back after OpenAI employees threatened mass resignations.
Greg Brockman, the former president and chairman of OpenAI, announced on X that “based on today’s news, i quit,” quoting a brief message he supposedly sent to OpenAI. He resigned from his role as president — in a tweet, Brockman said that he was removed as chair by the board. He added that he still believed in “creating safe AGI” — artificial general intelligence — “that benefits all of humanity.” Altman, in his own message, had also expressed a belief that his work was benefiting humanity. A goal of societally-beneficial AGI is essentially OpenAI’s mission statement.
OpenAI is the artificial intelligence research company responsible for the GPT-n series (their large language models, the most recent of which is GPT-4), ChatGPT, a chatbot built on top of these (GPT-3.5 or GPT-4 depending on your subscription), the text-to-image model DALL·E (which uses GPT), the speech recognition model Whisper, and other incredible products. OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit. Sam Altman and Elon Musk were the first members of the board. Their original research director was Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman was the original CTO. This company rose to extreme importance under Altman’s leadership.
The board of OpenAI now consists of Ilya Sutskever (who seems to have led most board communications in the past few days), Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner. Sutskever is a co-founder and the company’s chief scientist. He is currently the co-lead of OpenAI’s “Superalignment” team, which seeks to create an “automated alignment researcher.” D’Angelo is the founder and CEO of Quora, and the former CTO of Facebook in its early years. McCauley was formerly the CEO of GeoSim Systems, a city modeling company. Toner is directs strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. She writes about AI security and foreign affairs, especially regarding China. She formerly worked at Open Philanthropy. The board as a whole seems to be heavily alignment-focused. The new interim CEO, Mira Murati, was highly involved in company operations as CTO. Before working at OpenAI, Murati was a high-ranked product manager at Tesla. She is very concerned about safety, and has said that with AI, “government regulators should certainly be very involved.” The company is currently searching for a permanent CEO.
Microsoft has recently invested heavily in OpenAI, and the recent events caused the Microsoft stock price to fall dramatically on Friday. Microsoft will continue their work with OpenAI.
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