Turbulent few days for OpenAI ends, after new board of directors is announced and Sam Altman returns as CEO.
The turbulence that has rocked OpenAI and the artificial intelligence (AI) community in the past five days is coming to an end.
OpenAI has agreed for ousted CEO Sam Altman to return to the ChatGPT-maker, with a new board of directors being appointed.
It comes after OpenAI’s non-profit board of directors had on Friday shocked the entire tech industry, when they unexpectedly fired CEO Sam Altman, who has been the public face of the firm since 2019.
Redmond, is by far OpenAI’s biggest investor and OpenAI depends on Microsoft’s Azure cloud infrastructure for its costly computing infrastructure.
The software giant expressed its displeasure at OpenAI’s board, with reports suggesting it was offering jobs to all OpenAI staff.
And the pressure on the OpenAI board continued to mount, when OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, who had been appointed as interim chief executive, said she was lobbying for Altman’s return to the company.
And one of the four board members who participated in Altman’s ouster, OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, later expressed regret and joined the call for the board’s resignation.
It also emerged that 743 out of 770 staff at OpenAI had threatened to resign en masse, after they signed a letter demanding that Altman and Brockman return to their positions at the firm and that the current board resign, or else they will move over to Microsoft.
Satya Nadella added to the pressure when he called for a “change” in the governance of OpenAI. “At this point, I think it’s very, very clear that something has to change around the governance” of OpenAI, Nadella told CNBC.
Microsoft is rapidly integrating AI into its product suite, and only last week at its Ignite conference revealed it had developed a custom AI chip called Maia, along with an ARM-based CPU called Cobalt for general-purpose cloud workloads.
The AI chip is designed to reduce the company’s reliance on Nvidia, although Microsoft was quick to downplay the chip’s impact on its partnership with Nvidia.
Altman reinstated
Now on Wednesday, OpenAI confirmed that Sam Altman is returning as CEO, and a new board of directors has been appointed.