The Board Turns to the Ex-Twitch CEO in Sam Altman’s Attempt to Return

An Investor’s Perspective on OpenAI and the State of AI: How Funding Platforms and Non-For-Profit Organizations Will End up Behaving Arbitrarily

One of the sources says some investors had previously feared OpenAI’s remaining independent directors—with little background in corporate governance—could end up failing in their oversight duties. Less thought was given to the possibility of aggressive action like that taken against Altman. “I never expected them to be activists,” the person says.

There were difficulties in trying to restore Altman as CEO and replace the board due to the role of existing directors in choosing their replacements, according to the report.

Nathan Benaich, general partner of Air Street Capital and coauthor of the “State of AI Report,” says OpenAI’s corporate structure has proven to be at odds with the need to support cutting-edge research through huge amounts of equity investment. “It was an experiment to defy the laws of corporate physics, and it appears that physics won out,” he says.

When Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and other investors formed the startup behind ChatGPT as a US not-for-profit organization in 2015, Altman told Vanity Fair he had very little experience with nonprofits. “So I’m just not sure how it’s going to go,” he said.

The Openai War: The Rise of an Advanced Artificial Intelligence Division in the Tech Industry During the September 11 Breakdown of OpenAI

“OpenAI’s stability and success are too important to allow turmoil to disrupt them like this,” says Shear. “I will endeavor to address the key concerns as well, although in many cases I believe it may take longer than a month to achieve true progress.”

Shear co-founding the website that eventually became Twitch, after resigning as the CEO of the company. He is taking over the position of Openai interim CEO. The sudden firing of Sam Altman led to the temporary appointment of Mira Murati, the chief technology officer. The OpenAI board is in talks to potentially bring him back, and a lot of the employees showed their support for him.

Earlier that day, Microsoft CEO Nadella announced that the tech company was establishing a new advanced artificial intelligence research team headed by Altman and Brockman.

Nadella also said Greg Brockman, the former president of OpenAI who quit in protest after Altman’s sudden departure, would be joining the new AI division at Microsoft alongside Altman.

OpenAI, founded by Altman, Elon Musk and others about eight years ago as a nonprofit AI research lab, released ChatGPT last year, setting the pace for the entire tech industry’s focus on a sophisticated type of artificial intelligence known as generative AI.

Microsoft still has a “multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, rumored to be worth around $10 billion. Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, and Microsoft’s cloud services power all OpenAI workloads across products, API services, and research.

The Maia chip was being tested by Microsoft and it was worked on by Altman and OpenAI. Microsoft was quick to downplay its the chip’s impact on its close Nvidia partnership, but the Maia GPU is part of a series and the company is already working on a second generation.

The new advanced artificial intelligence team was formed by Microsoft with the leadership of Brockman and Altman. It comes just a week after Microsoft announced it has built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft has also built its own Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. Both custom silicon chips are designed to power its Azure data centers.