Vaidehi R | 231ADP20 |
OpenAI's Leadership Turmoil
OpenAI faced a crisis when CEO Sam Altman was unexpectedly removed by the board due to concerns regarding his abusive behaviour and management of AI safety. This was a major shock for the company as Altman had already established his presence in the company well versed. Although he was removed by the boards, due to the immense pressure from the employees and the investors, the board had to retrieve the decision and Sam Altman was reinstated on November 22.
OpenAI
OpenAI is a non-profit research company that develops AI with the goal of being beneficial to humanity. It conducts research in areas like machine learning, deep learning and reinforcement learning. It was founded in 2015 by a group of tech visionaries like Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, John Schulman and Wojciech. Altman and Tesla CEO Elon Must were co-chairs of the organization. In the beginning, OpenAI started with $1 billion in funding which was provided by Altman, Musk, American entrepreneur Peter Thiel and the cloud computing company Amazon Web Services. Later OpenAI made great advances with large language models which are trained to provide responses to user prompts with natural language processing, in a more humanized manner rather than using specialized programming languages.
Mission - To advance AI in a safe and beneficial way that prioritizes fairness, transparency and safety.
Sam Altman
Sam Altman is an American entrepreneur who was the president of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator from 2014 to 2019 and chief executive officer of the artificial intelligence company OpenAI which began in 2019. Altman took over the company after Elon Mask’s resignation in 2018 and later he turned OpenAI to become a profit entity. He has been compared to tech visionaries which includes personalities like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and is known for his belief that artificial general intelligence will be able to do anything that humans can.
What Really Happened?
In November 2023 Open AI a leading artificial intelligence company faced a major crisis when CEO Sam Altman was unexpectedly removed by the board. The board’s decision was made up by the concerns about Sam Altman’s management of artificial intelligence’s safety and based on the allegations of his abusive behaviour. The sudden decision was a major shock to the employees and investors leading to a major confusion and backlash. Before the removal of Altman certain disagreements about AI safety had already made a division among the employees in various manner. The launch of Chatgpt increased the tensions between OpenAI profit side and also it affected its non-profit roots. In a 2019 email Altman referred these divisions as “tribes”, which in turn became a trigger in the beginning. Altman was actively seeking funding from middle eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip which could compete with Nvidia, at the same time he was also in talks with SoftBank’s chairman, Masayoshi Son to develop AI hardware with former Apple designer Jony Ive.
However certain oppositions were being accused saying that they misuesd OpenAI's name. This major acquisition was made by Sustskever who was a tech visionary of OpenAI. Due to this acquisition Altman reduced Sutskever’s role in October 2023 which eventually deepened the divide. On November 22, 2023 new issues emerged by suggesting that Altman’s dismissal might be linked to his handling of a project which mainly focuses on improving AI’s logical and mathematical reasoning abilities. Certain concerns were raised based on this project by the board.
A report from the Washigton Post which was published on December stated that OpenAI's board of directors were concerned over his abusive behaviour which became a major factor for his removal. The post also stated about the dishonesty which Altman continued to show which eventually lead to his removal from Y Combinator which in turn led to the board's decision to let him go.
Reinstatement of Sam Altman
Tiger Global Management and Sequoia Capital tried to help Sam Altman return as CEO of OpenAI but on November 18th the board missed the deadline of reinstating him. Altman was hesitant to return as he wanted a new board to be established. After certain negotiations being made, on November 19th the board chose Emmett Shear as the CEO instead of reinstating Altman. This led to mass resignations from employees by which a letter was signed by 745 out of 770 staff members. On November 21, Altman was reinstated with a new interim board as the number of resignation from the employees was increasing. Although Altman was reinstated , he and the co-founder Greg Brockman agreed not to return to board seats. An internal investigation was done through which it was found out that Altman’s behaviour did not justify his removal. However, he faced certain acquisitions of withholding information and was criticized for the way he handled his management style which led to major concerns about his leadership.
Post Market Effects
Shares in Microsoft dropped nearly 3% after the news of his removal. Worldcoin a cryptocurrency co-founded by Altman saw a 12% decline in value. However after the reinstatement Microsoft's stock had risen over 2%. The reinstatement gave an opportunity for the competitors like Anthropic, Quora, Meta platforms and Google. As a result, the entire AI system got major threat. OpenAI reached out to competitors like Anthropic, Google Cloud, Cohere and Microsoft Azure for support.
Sources
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sam-Altman
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Removal_of_Sam_Altman_from_OpenAI
