suddenly! Altman, the number one figure in AI and the father of ChatGPT, is Out!
On Friday afternoon, Eastern Time, OpenAI’s official blog released a piece of news that 38-year-old Sam Altman was removed from his position as CEO and board of directors.
Sam Altman
Mira Murati , the company's chief technology officer , will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately, while OpenAI continues to search for a formal successor to the CEO.
CTO Mira Murati
The official announcement is merciless:
"Altman's departure comes after the Board's careful review and concluded that he has been inconsistent in his communications with the Board and hindered the Board's ability to carry out his responsibilities. The Board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI."
OpenAI also does an excellent job of keeping confidentiality. According to foreign media The Verge, citing multiple internal sources, OpenAI’s own employees only learned of the news when the announcement was made! Bloomberg reported that Altman was still sending emails to employees on Friday morning.
OpenAI co-founder and former board chairman Greg Brockman will also resign from the board but will remain OpenAI president.
OpenAI's board of directors currently consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner, strategic director of the Center for Security and Emerging Technologies at Georgetown University.
unexpected dismissal
Altman's dismissal was unexpected. He has long been regarded as almost a spokesperson for the AI field.
Altman co-founded OpenAI eight years ago, initially serving as co-chairman of the company with Elon Musk . Musk resigned in 2018 to avoid conflicts of interest with Tesla. He has since founded his own artificial intelligence company, xAI. In the process, OpenAI has grown from a small nonprofit to a multi-billion dollar company at near-record speed.
Last year, OpenAI released ChatGPT , a chatbot capable of generating human-like text, becoming one of the most transformative products in the history of technology. About 100 million people use ChatGPT every week, the company said in November, and more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies are building tools on OpenAI's platform. According to a Bloomberg report in August, OpenAI provides software to enterprises and is expected to have annual revenue of approximately US$1 billion.
The company just hosted its first developer conference, OpenAI DevDay, last week, hosted by Altman, who spoke Thursday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference and an event in Oakland, California.
Altman himself responded to the news of his resignation on social media:
“I loved my time at OpenAI, it was transformative for me personally and hopefully a little bit for the world. Most of all, I loved working with such talented people. More on that later Talk more about what’s next.”
Without a long-term leader and "public face," people inside and outside the company are curious about OpenAI's future.
Pieter Abbeel, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley and founder of an artificial intelligence startup who worked as a research scientist at OpenAI in 2016 and 2017, told Bloomberg that he was "completely confused" to hear that Altman was fired from the company. , GPT-4 wouldn’t exist, which is kind of crazy.”
some guesses
It's unclear what mistakes Altman may have made while leading OpenAI, but they may have to do with OpenAI's unique board and corporate governance structure.
VentureBeat recently published an article stating that OpenAI’s for-profit subsidiary OpenAI Global, LLC is completely controlled by OpenAI’s non-profit organization. While the for-profit subsidiary is allowed to commercialize its technology, it must adhere to the nonprofit's mission: to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI), or, as OpenAI defines it, "artificial intelligence that surpasses humans in the most economically valuable tasks." intelligent.
The board of directors of the nonprofit OpenAI has the power to decide when the company implements AGI and exclude that AGI from IP licensing and other business terms, including a partnership with Microsoft, one of OpenAI's largest investors.
But since the definition of AGI is far from agreed upon, what would it mean for OpenAI and the world at large to have non-profit board members decide whether to implement AGI? And what does the timing and context of potential future decisions mean for its largest investor, Microsoft?
Altman told the Financial Times this week that he "hopes" Microsoft will increase its investment to help cover the "huge" looming costs of model training.
Altman's departure comes as OpenAI is in active talks to raise significant new capital.
According to the Wall Street Journal, citing people familiar with the matter, OpenAI is discussing the possibility of selling shares. This move will increase the company’s valuation from US$29 billion to US$80 billion to US$90 billion, and employees will be allowed to sell cash. There are shares, rather than the company issuing new shares.
Some industry insiders said this was a normal executive change. Rowan Curran, a senior analyst at Forrester who covers generative artificial intelligence and machine learning, said the board's decision to remove Altman as CEO should be viewed similarly to other executive-level changes in the technology industry.
"Sam Altman has clearly been a force at OpenAI and has contributed much to the growth of the company, but given what we know so far, there is currently no reason to believe there are any potential issues with the company, the technology, or its approach," he said.
Microsoft, which has invested US$10 billion in OpenAI, saw its share price fall 2.4% on news of Altman's departure. "We have a long-standing partnership with OpenAI, and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and its team to bring the next era of artificial intelligence to our customers," the company said in a statement.
Author: BitpushNews Mary Liu
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