What happened to OpenAI and what's Next for the AI Industry

Tuesday - November 21 2023, 20:58 UTC - 1 year ago

This past weekend, OpenAI's board shocked people by firing CEO Sam Altman, leading to a coup and chaos. Mira Murati became the interim CEO, before Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, was appointed. Altman and Brockman accepted jobs at Microsoft, and 500 OpenAI employees have signed a letter to the board threaten to quit and join Altman. It's an example of the tension between trying to launch products quickly and slowing down development for safety. Shear appears to be a world away from Altman's pace of AI, promoting slowing down, carefulness, and ensuring safe technology. Despite all this, Sutskever believes OpenAI can continue to lead the field with the good ideas they have.

OpenAI, are you okay, babe? This past weekend has been a fever dream in the AI world. The board of OpenAI, the world’s hottest AI company, shocked everyone by firing CEO Sam Altman. Cue an AI-safety coup, chaos, and a new job at Microsoft for Altman.

If you were offline this weekend, my colleague Will Douglas Heaven and I break down what you missed and what’s next for the AI industry.

What happened .

Friday afternoonSam Altman was summoned to a Google Meet meeting, where chief scientific officer Ilya Sutskever announced that OpenAI’s board had decided Altman had been "not consistently candid in his communications" with them, and he was fired. OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman and a string of senior researchers quit soon after, and CTO Mira Murati became the interim CEO.

Saturday Murati made attempts to hire Altman and Brockman back, while the board was simultaneously looking for its own successor to Altman. Altman and OpenAI staffers pressured the board to quit and demanded that Altman be reinstated, giving the board a deadline, which was not met.

Sunday nightMicrosoft announced it had hired Altman and Brockman to lead its new AI research team. Soon after that, OpenAI announced it had hired Emmett Shear, the former CEO of the streaming company Twitch, as its CEO.

Monday morningOver 500 OpenAI employees have signed a letter threatening to quit and join Altman at Microsoft unless OpenAI’s board steps down. Bizarrely, Sutskever also signed the letter, and posted on X that he "deeply regrets" participating in the board’s actions.

What’s next for OpenAI .

Two weeks ago, at OpenAI’s first DevDay, Altman interrupted his presentation of an AI cornucopia to ask the whooping audience to calm down. "There’s a lot—you don’t have to clap each time," he said, grinning wide.

New interim CEO Shear, who cofounded Twitch, appears to be a world away from Altman when it comes to the pace of AI development. "I specifically say I’m in favor of slowing down, which is sort of like pausing except it’s slowing down," he posted on X in September. "If we’re at a speed of 10 right now, a pause is reducing to 0. I think we should aim for a 1-2 instead." .

This tension between trying to launch products quickly and slowing down development to ensure they are safe has vexed OpenAI from the very beginning. It was the reason key players in the company decided to leave OpenAI and start the competing AI safety startup Anthropic.

Shear’s public comments make him exactly the kind of cautious leader who would heed Sutskever’s concerns. As Shear also posted on X: "The way you make it safely through a dangerous jungle at night is not to sprint forward at full speed, nor to refuse to proceed forward. You poke your way forward, carefully." .

With the company orienting itself even more toward tech that does not yet—and may never—exist, will it continue to lead the field? Sutskever thought so. He said there were enough good ideas in play for others at the company to continue pushing the envelope of what’s possible with generative AI. "Over the years, we’ve cultivated a robust research organization that’s delivering the latest advancements in AI more quickly than ever," he said.