Microsoft, AI, and Corporate Governance: OpenAI and the Founding Sponsors of the ChatGPT Startup: Sam Altman, Elon Musk and Emmett Shear
Microsoft has now created a special “advanced AI research team” to house a number of former OpenAI employees, with Altman offered a CEO title to lead the division. The company rarely uses CEO titles for the leaders of its divisions, which is why it decided to use one for the heads of big divisions like Microsoft Gaming. OpenAI employees have made it clear that Microsoft is treating this like a big acquisition, assuring existing employees that there are open roles to join Altman and his team at Microsoft.
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 root of OpenAI’s chaos is a corporate structure that is designed to protect humanity against rogue artificial intelligence.
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 wasn’t sure how it was going to go.
“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,” Nadella said in his statement. We will work with the new leadership team and get to know them.
Microsoft launched its new advancedai research team just a week after revealing it has built a custom chip that can be used to train large language models, and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Altman had been reportedly pitching a separate startup to build custom, Nvidia-rivaling AI tensor processing unit (TPU) chips to investors recently, according to The New York Times.
Shear says that Openai’s stability and success are important and shouldn’t be disrupted by turmoil. It may take longer than a month to achieve true progress as I will aim to address the key concerns, but I will do everything I can.
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 post on X (formerly Twitter), Altman acknowledged he was joining Microsoft by reposting Nadella with the message “the mission continues.” Nadella responded by providing some hints at how he sees Altman’s role at Microsoft. Over the years we have learned how to give people space to build their own identities within Microsoft and I hope you will do the same.
The new president of Microsoft’s artificial intelligence division was Greg Brockman, the former president of OpenAI, who quit in protest after Altman’s sudden departure.
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 still has a “multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, rumored to be worth around $10 billion. Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner for Openai and they power all Openai workloads across products,API services and research.
Benaich and Sutskever: Why should Air Street Capital be taking a stand against Altman’s executive boardroom coup?
Nathan Benaich, the founder and general partner at Air Street Capital says thatSatya now looks like one of the most epic kingmakers.
Remarkably, the letter’s signees include Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of its board, who has been blamed for coordinating the boardroom coup against Altman in the first place.
Nadela appeared to leave the door open to any OpenAI employees eager to jump ship, adding of Altman’s new Microsoft subsidiary: “We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”
