Late Sunday, Satya Nadella posted on X that Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and “colleagues” were joining Microsoft. Two days earlier Altman had been pushed out as chief executive of OpenAI.
Nadella said Microsoft remains committed to its OpenAI partnership. He also said Altman and his group would lead what he described as “a new advanced research firm.”
A sudden exit
OpenAI’s board removed Altman, a cofounder, late Friday. Brockman, the company’s president and Altman’s lieutenant, left in his wake. For a stretch of the weekend it was unclear whether Altman held the job at all, and TechRadar was reporting that the board was apparently trying to bring him back.
The board gave no full account of its reasons. Its own statement on the matter, TechRadar noted, did hint at some form of dishonesty on Altman’s part. That left commentators guessing. One theory TechRadar floated was that Altman had shown the directors something about progress toward artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that frightened them. Another was that he had not been fully open about the state of the development team’s AGI work, and that the board panicked when it found out.
It was only a guess. But the timing stood out. Altman’s most recent public appearance was the event where he introduced GPTs, a store for buying them, and new Turbo versions of GPT-4. There he made clear that OpenAI was making significant leaps toward AGI, and that the definition of AGI keeps shifting. What ChatGPT does now, he argued, would have passed for AGI a decade ago.
Why OpenAI matters
OpenAI is a non-profit that builds ChatGPT, arguably the world’s most popular AI chatbot, and the DALL-E image generator. Until late 2022 most people had never dealt directly with an AI. ChatGPT, built on GPT-3, changed that almost overnight. TechRadar said public mood moved from fascination to excitement, to utility, to integration and finally to deep concern within six months.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s benefactor, helped carry that technology to more consumers, first through Bing and then through Windows, the most widely used platform in the world.
Altman himself does not strike TechRadar as an “AI cowboy.” He sat before Congress earlier this year and called for regulation. Something still spooked the board, the outlet wrote.
What happens next
TechRadar argued that Altman’s place or absence at OpenAI will shape the next five years of AI, and the AGI era to come, including how people use chatbots, tackle hard problems and regulate the technology for the long term.
Nadella’s announcement did not settle the larger question. How well Microsoft and OpenAI can keep working together is open, TechRadar said, when many of the people who built the GPT technology and forged the relationship now sit inside Microsoft.
