OpenAI and the Loss of a Founder - The New York Times

People are going to be talking about the blowup at OpenAI for years. ChatGPT itself — a product of OpenAI — could not have concocted a tale as wild as the one that unfolded over the weekend.

OpenAI’s board of directors fired a co-founder, Sam Altman, as chief executive officer on Friday, saying he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board. On Sunday the board rejected pressure to take Altman back. Hours later, Microsoft announced it was hiring him and Greg Brockman, another founder, to lead a new advanced A.I. research team.

By Monday morning, OpenAI was in open chaos. More than 700 of the organization’s 770 employees signed a letter saying they might quit to join Altman unless the four-person OpenAI board resigned, The Times reported . Ilya Sutskever, the board member and chief scientist at OpenAI who organized Altman’s ouster, posted on Monday, “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”

There’s a lot to talk about here, including the apparent disagreement between Altman and the OpenAI board about how to steer artificial intelligence research so A.I. doesn’t destroy the human race. But I want to focus on what finance people call the key-person problem.

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