Sam Altman was fired from the startup on Friday (Nov 17); in a letter, 95% of employees asked the co-founder for feedback
After the dismissal of Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, employees of the artificial intelligence startup threaten to resign if directors do not leave their positions immediately. He was dismissed on Friday (Nov 17) by the Board of Directors on the grounds that there was no longer confidence in his ability to “continue leading”.
In a letter published by the North American magazine Wired this Monday (Nov 20), 730 employees (out of a total of 770) accuse the board of boycotting OpenAI and failing in its duties to supervise the startup. They call on the board to resign and reinstate Altman as CEO, along with co-founder and former chairman Greg Brockman.
“The process by which you fired Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board undermined all of this work and undermined our mission and company,” says the letter. “Your conduct made it clear that you were not competent to supervise OpenAI”.
Among the signatories of the document is Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and member of the administrative board who coordinated Altman’s departure on Friday (Nov 17). Shortly before the letter was released, Sutskever wrote in a Twitter post that he regretted “deep” their participation in council actions.
“I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we have built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”, he declared. Around 738 of the startup’s 770 employees, almost 95% of the company, have already signed the letter.
OpenAI stated that the departure was due to him not being “consistently candid in your communications with the board and AI policy [Inteligência Artificial]impairing their ability to exercise their responsibilities”.
Microsoft
This Monday (Nov 20), Microsoft announced the hiring of Sam Altman. Now, the OpenAI co-founder will serve as chief executive of Microsoft’s new AI group, along with Greg Brockman and other employees who left the company in protest over his dismissal.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella he said on X (formerly Twitter), which the company is “extremely excited” have Altman and Brockman, along with the other new employees, lead a “new advanced AI research team”.
Nadella stated that Microsoft will remain committed to the partnership with OpenAI and welcomed Emmett Shear (formerly Twitch), who was announced as the new CEO of OpenAI.
Since 2019, Microsoft has invested around US$11 billion in OpenAI to invest in and promote artificial intelligence. According to the Financial Timesthere was a movement by investors, including Microsoft, to bring back the former CEO and remove the company’s board.
In response to Nadella’s post, Altman stated: “the mission continues”.
In February, Microsoft announced the introduction of the AI tool in its products, such as the Edge browser and the Bing search engine. Currently, the big tech is expanding the feature to the company-owned job and business platform LinkedIn.
Sam Altman founded OpenAI in 2015 to address the issue of AI responsibly, together with a group of people including billionaire Elon Musk.
Starting in 2019, OpenAI became a for-profit company and, in 2022, launched ChatGPT, a language modeling tool based on deep artificial neural networks.
ChatGPT reached the milestone of 100 million active users in just 2 months after launch. It was the first platform to achieve this feat, but the record was broken by Threads, Meta’s social network, which broke the mark in 5 days.
Read the full letter released this Monday (Nov 20):
To the OpenAI Board of Directors,
OpenAI is the world’s leading artificial intelligence company. We, the people at OpenAI, develop the best models and push the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI security and governance shapes global norms. The products we build are used by millions of people around the world. To date, the company we work for and value has never been in a stronger position.
The process by which you fired Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board compromised all of this work and undermined our mission and company. Your actions made it clear that you did not have the necessary competence to oversee OpenAI.
When we all unexpectedly learned of their decision, the OpenAI leadership team acted quickly to stabilize the company. They listened carefully to your concerns and tried to cooperate with you in every aspect. Despite many requests for specific facts for your allegations, you have never provided any written evidence. They also increasingly realized that you were not capable of carrying out your duties and were negotiating in bad faith.
The leadership team suggested that the most stabilizing path forward – the one that would best serve our mission, company, stakeholders, employees and the public – would be his resignation and the establishment of a qualified board capable of leading the company with stability.
Leadership worked with you tirelessly to find a mutually acceptable solution. However, within 2 days of your initial decision, you again replaced interim CEO Mira Murati, against the best interests of the company. You also informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed “would be consistent with the mission.”
Your actions have made it clear that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We cannot work for or with people who lack competence, judgment and care for our mission and employees. We, the undersigned, can choose to resign from OpenAI and join the recently announced Microsoft subsidiary led by Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees at this new subsidiary should we choose to join. We will take this action imminently unless all current board members resign and the board appoints two new lead independent directors, Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstalls Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
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