Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, the two main names who developed ChatGPT, left behind their roles as CEO and President at OpenAI and moved to Microsoft. Of course, this separation was not what either of them really wanted. OpenAI’s board of directors made a shock decision to fire the company’s founder, Sam Altman, and replaced him with former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear. But it’s not all over yet. It looks like “vultures” are circling OpenAI and employees are already starting to resign.The foundations of the technology world are being shaken
The tech world is abuzz with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s announcement that Sam Altman will be joining the tech giant as the head of its new advanced AI research team. You can learn the whole behind-the-scenes of the incident in detail from the link below:
Former OpenAI chief Greg Brockman, who resigned following Altman’s dismissal and will join the former OpenAI CEO at Microsoft, said the “initial leadership” of the new AI team at X will include OpenAI employees Jakub Pachocki, Szymon Sidor, and Aleksander Madry. He said they were all preparing to leave the AI startup. The company’s employees will also join these important names. Meanwhile, Microsoft announced Sam Altman as CEO of the new unit.
All three are senior or long-time employees at OpenAI, suggesting the company may be facing a talent drain following Altman’s shock firing. In fact, the signals for this were given directly by Nadella: “We are extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, along with their colleagues, will join Microsoft to lead a new advanced artificial intelligence research team,” he said.Pachocki, meanwhile, was OpenAI’s director of research, Madry was the company’s head of preparation, and Sidor was a research scientist who had been at OpenAI since 2016, a year after its founding. The crisis is not limited to these. In the past hours, former and current employees, including OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and COO Brad Lightcap, coordinately shared on X that “OpenAI is nothing without its employees.” In fact, dozens of employees reportedly left the company after the firm’s chief investigator, Ilya Sutskever, announced that Altman would not be returning.
Ultimatum from employees to management
Now, journalist Kara Swisher has accessed an internal document within the company and shared the letter in which 505 of OpenAI’s 700 employees called on the board of directors to resign. In the last paragraph of the letter, there is an ultimatum that 505 people can resign and join Microsoft. It is also underlined that Microsoft has given “assurance” to all OpenAI employees for this transition. The letter also states that resignations will be made immediately unless the entire board resigns, appoints two new independent directors, Bret Taylor and Will Hurd, and reinstates Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. It is unclear exactly when this letter was delivered to the board of directors. Additionally, it appears to have the signature of Ilya Sutskever.
Vultures circling OpenAI
It is true that the business world is a wild place. But this gets even wilder when you’re at the top of the software world. Already, other AI startups Cohere and Adept have reportedly reached out to OpenAI employees. There has also been an increase in resumes from OpenAI employees coming to Google Deepmind.
These companies are not the only ones eyeing OpenAI employees. While Nvidia’s senior AI scientist Jim Fan said he was “shocked” by the developments, he was seen posting a direct call to OpenAI employees on X, saying the company “has GPUs hot out of the oven for you on a cold winter night like this.” Jim Fan also said, “My team at Nvidia is hiring.”
Recently, Ilya Sutskever, the company’s chief investigator and in fact one of the main responsible for the events, said that he regretted his actions and that his intention was not to harm the company, and said: “I love everything we have built together and I will do everything in my power to bring the company back together. ” Altman quoted this post with three heart emojis.
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