This was the internal rebellion at OpenAI that struck down its CEO Sam Altman… and this is how the pressure is being for him to return

Sam Altman woke up on Friday as one of the most admired executives in Silicon Valley, the person in charge of what is probably the company with the most potential in the technology sector right now, OpenAI. Creator of the well-known artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT, the company has become the benchmark of the latest digital “gold rush”, the partner that companies like Microsoft or Salesforce want to have at their side.

At one in the afternoon of that same day, the board of directors announced his dismissal. “We have no confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” they indicated in an aggressive and unexpected statement in which they also named Mira Murati, until now chief technology officer, as interim CEO.

The news not only caught the entire technology sector by surprise. Altman himself, according to what has been leaked, did not know about the decision until an hour before the text was published.. His right-hand man, Greg Brockman, found out just five minutes before. Shortly after, he also announced his departure from the company.. “Sam and I are surprised and saddened by what the board has done today,” he explained on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.

As the hours have passed, the reasons for such an abrupt decision have begun to leak, mainly through employees and sources close to the company.. They draw a complicated internal tension resulting from the evolution that OpenAI has had since its creation and that has ended in a coup orchestrated by the director of research and development, Ilya Sutskever, and some of the members of the board of directors.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting safe and ethical research in artificial intelligence.. Its founders considered that the development and control of artificial intelligence tools by a company like Google could pose a danger to society.. It was necessary to have an open alternative not subject to private companies.

But in recent years, as OpenAI's applications have become more sophisticated – and desirable to the market – Altman has changed course, turning it into a mainstream company.. In January of this year, it also secured its future with a multimillion-dollar investment by Microsoft, which has already allocated more than $13 billion to the company and is the exclusive provider of the technology it needs to function.

The agreement was necessary because in order to train and run the complex language models that make tools like ChatGPT or Dall-E (a generative artificial intelligence capable of creating images from a text description) possible, enormous computing capacity is necessary.. OpenAI charges for access to its tools, both to users of advanced ChatGPT functions and to companies that use its language models in their own applications, but it has not yet generated profits.

The speed at which Altman was advancing in this commercial aspect, however, did not sit well with some of the company's researchers and engineers.. “Altman's approach and the speed at which he wanted to move conflicted with the vision of OpenAI that some of the workers and board members had,” explains Kara Swisher, a veteran journalist who has spent decades covering the ins and outs of Silicon Valley.

The recent OpenAI developer conference, in which Altman announced a store to sell access to conversational artificial intelligence generated from ChatGPT, a strategy that gives OpenAI even greater control over the future of the sector, seems to have been the trigger for this internal war, which has culminated in the dismissal of the executive.

The ramifications of this decision can be complex, but one of the first victims is Microsoft itself, which after learning of the decision lost almost $48 billion in stock market valuation.. Mira Murati, the current interim CEO, has assured employees in an internal email that the agreement with Microsoft will remain stable.

And a possible return

But all this internal rebellion is being overwhelmed in recent hours by the pressure that the board is receiving for Sam Altman to be reinstated to his old position.. OpenAI investors are surprised by the reaction it has triggered since the announcement of its departure on Friday, and this Sunday it emerged that Altman is negotiating his possible return with the same board that precipitated his famous work.

On Saturday, hours after learning of Altman's abrupt departure, the French Internet Minister, Jean-Noël Barrot, invited him to move to France.

“Sam Altman, his team and his talents are, if they wish, welcome in France, where we are accelerating [our efforts] to put artificial intelligence at the service of the common good,” Barrot wrote on the X network (formerly Twitter).

But beyond the external pressure, which may be anecdotal, it is that of the company's own investors that has the OpenAI board concerned.

The recently ousted CEO of OpenAI is reportedly discussing a possible return to the company behind the ChatGPT bot even as he studies launching a new artificial intelligence (AI) company, a person briefed on the matter whose testimony is collected by Reuters said on Saturday. .

A day after the board fired him in a surprise move that shook the tech world, Altman was talking to OpenAI executives about how to improve the company's governance structure while arguing with some OpenAI principal researchers and others loyal to Altman how they could start a new AI company, the source said.

The chances of a return or reboot for Altman, seen by many as the face of generative AI, are in flux, said the source, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on behalf of the parties involved.

OpenAI and Altman did not respond to requests for comment. Investors in OpenAI, including its biggest backer, Microsoft, are discussing damage control, including possibly pressuring the board to restore Altman as CEO, fearing a mass exodus of talent without him, other sources said. .

Kholsa Ventures, an early backer of OpenAI, wants Altman to return to OpenAI but “will support him in everything he does next,” the fund's founder Vinod Khosla posted on X on Saturday. Microsoft declined to comment. He reportedly owns 49% of the company, while other investors and employees control 49%, and 2% is owned by OpenAI's nonprofit parent company.