OpenAI: The State of OpenAI, CEO Emmett Shear, and Technicolor’s “Mission Continues”

But fissures started to form when some members of the board became concerned that Altman wanted to rapidly push out AI products into the world and feverishly sign up customers without fully reckoning with the risks. Critics of OpenAI have claimed that the company abandoned its nonprofit values and took major investment funding from Microsoft and others.

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.

The general partner of Air Street Capital and coauthor of the “State of AI Report” says that OpenAI’s corporate structure has proven to be 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 that he was not sure how it would go.

In his statement, Nadella said that Microsoft would continue to support its customers and partners as well as innovate with everything they announced at Microsoft Ignite. “We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them.”

Separately, OpenAI’s board announced it has hired former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear to lead the company, naming him the interim CEO despite calls from some OpenAI investors to bring back Altman.

In a new post on X, Altman confirmed he’s joining Microsoft by posting a message from Nadella that says “the mission continues.” Nadella responded by providing some hints at how he sees Altman’s role at Microsoft. “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.”

Nadella also said Greg Brockman, the former president of OpenAI who quit in protest after Altman’s sudden departure, would be joining the new AI division at Microsoft alongside Altman.

OpenAI, founded by Altman, Elon Musk and others about eight years ago as a nonprofit AI research lab, released ChatGPT last year, setting the pace for the entire tech industry’s focus on a sophisticated type of artificial intelligence known as generative AI.

Microsoft is believed to be worth at least $10 billion and it still has an investment in OpenAI. Microsoft is the only cloud provider that powers all OpenAI workload, including products, 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 exactly a week after Microsoft announced that it had built its own chip, which could be used to train large language models and avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft has also built its own Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. The chips are designed to power the data centers.