Sam Altman – Credit Chen Galili
Sam Altman is back at OpenAI. In what has got to be one of the strangest business stories of 2023, the founder of the high-tech firm who was fired from his own company just a few days ago is back at the helm. And this is after the OpenAI board claimed he would not be returning, hiring former Twitch chief Emmett Shear as interim CEO.
The entire story sounds like something out of the television show Succession.
And the news comes after Sam Altman had already found a new job 2with Microsoft to head an advanced research lab with that company.
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“We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” the company said in a statement. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”
Larry Summers is a former US Secretary of the Treasury and a former president of Harvard University.
Bret Taylor, a former co-CEO of Salesforce, is expected to be the new chairman of OpenAI’s board.
Not only that, but Sam Altman seems to have gotten what he wanted as there will be an almost complete turnover on the company’s board, with Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, to be the only remaining member. Helen Toner, Tasha McCauley and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever – who was in favor of Altman’s ouster – are now gone.
While the true motivation behind Altman’s firing still remains a mystery, the New York Times had reported that a for it was his desire to oust certain members of the company’s board.
Sam Altman released a statement on Twitter about all of this, explaining how much he loves the company and that he only took the Microsoft job because he did not think he would be returning to OpenAI.
“i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” he wrote. “When i decided to join msft on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.”
Apparently, the OpenAI board realized that it had made a major miscalculation when it fired Sam Altman and did not expect such a huge backlash to this move from within. Reports indicated that as many as 700 OpenAI employees were threatening to quit if Altman did not return.
At the start of the week, OpenAI’s vice president of global affairs Anna Makanju was forced to release a memo to the company’s employees in an effort to reassure them.
So, Sam Altman is back at OpenAI, for now. And, so it seems, anything is possible. So don’t be surprised if tomorrow they announce a Twitter/Facebook merger.
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