The OpenAI drama, hopefully, ends with this news. After getting fired from OpenAI, Sam Altman is now joining Microsoft, along with Greg Brockman and others.
Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, announced on X that Altman and Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research.
“We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners.” read his post.
To this, Altman quote posted saying, “the mission continues.”
the mission continues https://t.co/d1pHiFxcSe
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 20, 2023
Interestingly, Nadella added that Microsoft is excited to work with OpenAI’s new leadership, including the new interim CEO Emmett Shear, who was the co-founder of Twitch.
Nadella further added that he is making Altman the CEO of this new AI research group.
Moreover, several OpenAI employees have reportedly disclosed their intentions to leave the company after Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist at OpenAI, said that Altman will no longer be the CEO of OpenAI.
The situation also provides an opportunity for competitors such as Google, who have been actively recruiting OpenAI personnel in the past 48 hours. Some OpenAI employees have expressed their interest in potentially joining Altman in any new AI ventures, a topic that Altman had reportedly been discussing over the weekend.
OpenAI currently has 700 employees, and it would be interesting to see how the company performs after key employees leave for Microsoft. Though Nadella has said that the company would work closely with OpenAI even now, with Altman controlling the decisions from Microsoft, things could get interesting.
Ironically, the board decision to remove the much loved CEO over a video call on Google Meet, has made almost all the employees start to question the motivation behind the rushed decision. Altman was followed by few other employees who were ready to quit, including Greg Brockman, the president of the company, making us question the board functioning.
According to internal reports, Altman had two contentions with the return to office. First is that the whole board should resign, and the second is that all team meetings should happen on Microsoft Teams, and not Google Meet from now on. If the board decided to not accept this, it would be like burning down the whole company just because of the choice of a video conferencing platform.
Hopefully, now everyone at OpenAI starts using Microsoft Teams.
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