Sam Altman and Greg Brockman Joins Microsoft for an Advanced Artificial Intelligence Research Team: An Experiment to Break the Physics of Corporate America

The board of OpenAI doesn’t have confidence in his ability to continue leading the group. Both Sam and Greg will be joining Microsoft’s new advanced artificial intelligence research team, after the company reached an agreement with Sam to rejoin OpenAI.

An attempt to restore Altman as CEO and replace the board ran into difficulty Sunday over the role of existing directors in choosing their replacements, Bloomberg reported.

Nathan Benaich is a general partner of Air Street Capital, and he said OpenAI’s corporate structure was at odds with the need to support cutting-edge research through huge amounts of equity investment. “It was an experiment to defy the laws of corporate physics, and it appears that physics won out,” he says.

When Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other investors formed the startup behind ChatGPT as a US not-for-profit organization in 2015, Altman told Vanity Fair he had very little experience with nonprofits. He said he was unsure how it would go.

Microsoft still has a “multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, rumored to be worth around $10 billion. Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, and Microsoft’s cloud services power all OpenAI workloads across products, API services, and research.

They worked with Microsoft to refine and test the Maia chip. Microsoft was quick to downplay its the chip’s impact on its close Nvidia partnership, but the Maia GPU is part of a series and the company is already working on a second generation.

Microsoft has now formed a new advanced AI research team to be lead by Altman and Brockman. Just a week ago Microsoft announced that it has built its own custom chip that could be used to train largelanguage models and avoid a costly dependence on the manufacturer of that chip. Microsoft has also built its own Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. Both custom silicon chips are designed to power its Azure data centers.

“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team,” says Nadella. “We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”