The Case for OpenAI: CEO Restructuring after Sam Altman Became Unpopular with Artificial Intelligence and the OpenAI Innovation Experiment
He couldn’t have imagined the drama of this week, with four directors on OpenAI’s nonprofit board unexpectedly firing him as CEO and removing the company’s president as chairman of the board. A restructuring that opened the door for billions of dollars in investment fromMicrosoft gave a few people with no financial stake in the company the ability to upend the project on a whim.
An attempt to replace the board with a new one, as well as to have Altman as CEO, ran into difficulty over the role of the existing directors, according to the report.
Air Street Capital’s general partner Nathan Benaich, who co-authored the “State of Artificial Intelligence Report”, says that the corporate structure of Openai has proved to be incompatible with the need to support cutting-edge research through huge amounts of equity investment. He says it appears that physics won out after the experiment to defy corporate physics.
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 is not sure how it will go.
It is too important for OpenAI to be disrupted like this. “I will endeavor to address the key concerns as well, although in many cases I believe it may take longer than a month to achieve true progress.”
Shear resigned as Twitch CEO earlier this year, after co-founding the Justin.tv platform that eventually became Twitch. A turbulent time for the company will make him the new Openai interim CEO. Chief technology officer Mira Murati briefly became the interim CEO of OpenAI on Friday, following the shock firing of Sam Altman. Openai employees showed their support for Altman with a display of public support.
Hours later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman and his OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman would be joining the tech giant to head a new advanced AI research team.
The former president of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, will be joining the new computer vision and artificial intelligence division at Microsoft.
A company founded by Altman, Musk and others, OpenAID, released a tool called ‘chatgpi’, which was the first of its kind in the tech industry.
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.
Altman and OpenAI had been working with Microsoft to refine and test the Maia AI 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. It comes just a week after Microsoft announced it has built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft builds its own Arm-based computer system for cloud use. The chips are designed to power the data centers.