Sam Altman Returning To OpenAI As CEO Less Than A Week After Ouster; New Board Named

Nancy Tartaglione
·4 min read
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Sam Altman is returning to OpenAI as CEO with a new board, the tech startup said early Wednesday morning. The news comes less than a week after Altman was suddenly ousted last Friday. By Sunday evening, he had moved to Microsoft to help lead a new group researching artificial intelligence.

Earlier this week, more than 500 OpenAI employees sent a letter to the board saying they would resign and join the new Microsoft group if Altman and President, Chairman and co-founder Greg Brockman were not reinstated and a new board formed.

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The new board of ChatGPT owner OpenAI will now include former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora co-founder and CEO Adam D’Angelo.

In a post on X, OpenAI wrote late Tuesday night Pacific time, “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board… We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

Altman followed that up with his own X post, addressing the quick shifts:

And Brockman said he was “getting back to coding tonight.”

When Altman’s move to Microsoft was announced late Sunday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella noted that the company “remains committed” to OpenAI, in which it has amassed a 49% stake.

Today, Nadella praised the changes at OpenAI, posting, “We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

Prior to the abrupt exit of Altman, OpenAI had been in talks for a new round of funding at a valuation of $80 billion, which would rank it as one of the most valuable startups in history.

Released about a year ago, the most recent version of OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT took the conversation about generative AI out of the laboratory and into the living room. Students working on term papers, professional workers developing presentations and millions of others suddenly gained easy access to a vast trove of resources, though it came with significant strings attached. As OpenAI’s valuation soared and Altman and other champions of ChatGPT espoused its potential to drive efficiencies and help speed cumbersome processes in areas like health care and other parts of society, some painted a much darker picture. A group of tech leaders, including Elon Musk, earlier this year called for a pause in AI development pending a more thorough review of its potential to do harm.

Even short of doomsday scenarios involving nuclear codes and machines freezing out their human creators, the issue of copyright has raised alarms in the creative community. AI was a central priority for both the WGA and SAG-AFTRA in the Hollywood guilds’ recent strikes against the AMPTP. ChatGPT is trained to create text and images through a process of feeding material into it. Copyright holders of those works have voiced concerns that the system erodes the value of their creations.

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