Over the past week, the entire tech industry has been glued to their screens as the leading artificial intelligence company and creator of ChatGPT, OpenAI, was embroiled in a power struggle that saw its CEO fired, replaced twice, and eventually brought back, all within five days.
The saga began after the OpenAI board of directors suddenly fired CEO, Sam Altman, one of the founders. Sam founded the company in 2015 alongside investors like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. Altman would go on to officially become its CEO in 2019 and remain there until all of this.
Just to add: OpenAI was co-founded by a group of tech visionaries and entrepreneurs, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman, among others.
Its board of directors is responsible for strategic decisions, and its day-to-day operations are overseen by an executive team that manages various aspects of the organization, including research, business development, and partnerships.
Initially, the company was founded as a non-profit AI research organisation in December 2015. Its original mission was to advance artificial intelligence in a way that benefits humanity as a whole. However, the organisation later evolved its structure to include elements of for-profit activities to secure additional funding for its ambitious research goals.
However, later on, it transitioned into a hybrid for-profit structure. The company now operates as a capped-profit company, which means it aims to generate profits but within certain limits, ensuring that the pursuit of profit doesn’t compromise its commitment to its mission of developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) safely and beneficially for humanity.
This structure allows it to attract investment, just like the Microsoft investment, while continuing its research and development efforts in AI.
Back to the timeline: The news of the sack of Altman sent shockwaves in the AI space globally as he is seen as the de facto face of what OpenAI, which is a major player in the world of artificial intelligence, is doing.
So, here is a run down of all that happened over the past week:
Fired on Friday
According to the company’s president, Greg Brockman via a post on X, it all started with a call on Thursday, November 16. Apparently, Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist at OpenAI and a co-founder, texted Altman on Thursday evening about scheduling a Friday noon call.
After that, Friday, November 17 was supposed to be just another typical day in the rapidly expanding AI company. However, out of nowhere in the late afternoon, the OpenAI board of directors declared that CEO Sam Altman would be leaving
OpenAI’s board did not share what exactly its issue with Altman was. Whatever it was, though, seemed extremely serious, as the board didn’t even wait until the markets closed. Many companies try to dump any negative press at the end of the day in order to control the most damaging fallout. This was not the case here.
The board also announced that OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati would take over as interim CEO. Just to note, Greg alleges that Mira Murati, the interim CEO, was informed on Thursday night that Altman would be fired.
Also, a vast majority of the board of directors was gone.
There are still many unanswered questions about the whole saga. For one, we still don’t know OpenAI’s concerns about Altman that led the board to abruptly fire him and say they basically could not trust him.
However, we know that Elon Musk, the former co-founder of OpenAI, released a letter that was shared with him earlier on, citing allegations of misconduct against Altman by the employees.
