Sam Altman, the co-founder and former CEO of ChatGPT, is back in charge of OpenAI, the AI research organization he helped create, after a dramatic turn of events that saw him and his partner Greg Brockman ousted and then reinstated by the board.
Altman was abruptly removed from his position at OpenAI on November 17, without any explanation from the board. While Brockman resigned afterward in protest. The decision sparked a massive backlash from OpenAI’s employees, who demanded their return and threatened to resign en masse.
Microsoft, which had invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, also intervened and hired the duo, along with some of their colleagues, to lead its AI research team.
The board of OpenAI eventually caved in and announced on X, formerly Twitter, that it had reached an “agreement in principle” for Altman to resume his role as CEO, with a new initial board consisting of Bret Taylor, the president and chief operating officer of Salesforce, Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Adam D’Angelo, the co-founder and CEO of Quora. The announcement also said that the parties were “collaborating to figure out the details” and thanked the community for their patience.
Brockman, who was the president of OpenAI, also confirmed on X that he was returning to the organization, saying that he was “getting back to coding” and that they “will come back stronger and more unified than ever.”
Altman and Brockman are widely respected in the AI community for their vision and leadership of OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 with the backing of several prominent tech figures, such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman. The organization’s mission is to create and ensure the safe and beneficial use of artificial general intelligence (AGI), a hypothetical form of AI that can perform any intellectual task that humans can.
Under their leadership, OpenAI produced several groundbreaking AI systems, such as GPT-2 and GPT-4, the large-scale language models that power ChatGPT. OpenAI also developed DALL-E, a generative model that can create images from text descriptions, and Codex, a system that can write code from natural language commands.
