Despite support from investors like Microsoft, OpenAI board decided to sack former CEO Sam Altman and former president and co-founder, Greg Brockman. After this shocking incident, present OpenAI employees are pushing back and criticising the removal of Altman. Mira Murati, former OpenAI CTO, was appointed as the interim CEO after Altman has recently posted, “OpenAI is nothing without its people.”
To this, Altman responded with a heart emoji. Notably, right after she aligned with Altman publicly and was rumoured that to be planning to re-hire both Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, she was replace by Emmett Shear as the interim CEO.
Murati was joined by several of her colleagues at OpenAI who are also not in support of ousting Altman out of nowhere. Brad Lightcap, COO at OpenAI, also posted the same thing, followed by Jason Kwoon, Chief Strategy Officer, Diane Yoon, VP of People at OpenAI, Sandhini Agarwal, AI Policy at OpenAI, Olivier Godement, Product, OpenAI and more.
Sam Altman will now lead a new advanced AI research team at Microsoft along with Brockman. Microsoft CEO recently posted on X, “I’m super excited to have you join as CEO of this new group, Sam, setting a new pace for innovation. We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having you do the same.” Responding to this, Brockman wrote, “We are going to build something new & it will be incredible.”
Sam Altman was appointed as OpenAI CEO back in 2019. Blindsided by the announcement, Altman was fired from the company over Google Meet over the weekend. In the blogpost, the company revealed that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” In the latest memo, as seen by The New York Times, the company stated, “Sam’s behavior and lack of transparency in his interactions with the board undermined the board’s ability to effectively supervise the company in the manner it was mandated to do.”
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