More than 500 employees sign letter saying they will join former chief at Microsoft unless board resigns.
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A staff revolt at OpenAI has put pressure on directors at the world’s leading artificial intelligence company to bring back ousted chief executive Sam Altman after a botched boardroom coup.
A letter to the board signed by more than 500 of OpenAI’s 770 employees on Monday said the directors had “undermined our mission and company” by the way they fired Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman on Friday.
After abortive talks to reinstate Altman on Sunday, in which he demanded the board resign as a price for his return, Microsoft announced that it had hired the 38-year-old entrepreneur and Brockman to head a new AI unit.
Even so, Altman indicated on Monday that he expected OpenAI to endure and was working with Microsoft chief executive Satya Nadella to secure the start-up’s future.
Their top priority was to ensure that OpenAI continued to thrive, Altman posted on X, adding: “we are committed to fully providing continuity of operations to our partners and customers [and] the openai/microsoft partnership makes this very doable.” It was “one team, one mission”, he said.
The hundreds of OpenAI staff who signed the letter said they had been offered positions in the new unit at Microsoft, the software company that is also OpenAI’s biggest investor, and “will take this step imminently, unless all current board members resign, and the board appoints two new lead independent directors”.
The counter-coup had already secured the support of one of the four remaining board members. Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist at AI, signed the letter from staff after first taking to social media to apologise for his role in firing Altman
“I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” he wrote on X. “I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”
The other remaining directors are Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora; technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley; and Helen Toner from the Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Some of OpenAI’s most prominent venture investors were holding out hope that Altman would return. The company’s board had made a “grave miscalculation”, wrote early OpenAI backer Vinod Khosla in a scathing editorial in The Information on Monday. “Every problem has a solution,” Thrive Capital founder Josh Kushner wrote on X.
Thrive is lined up to be the lead buyer in a sale of OpenAI employees’ stock which had been expected to close in the coming weeks. That sale, a chance for staff to cash in on OpenAI’s success by selling to investors, was expected to involve up to $1bn of stock and give the company an $86bn valuation, people with knowledge of the plans said.
The share sale was now in the balance, with the weekend’s drama representing a material change in circumstances, but could yet go ahead as planned should Altman return, according to one person with knowledge of the situation.
OpenAI’s release of its ChatGPT chatbot a year ago touched off an AI boom which has drawn billions of dollars in investment and spawned dozens of start-ups.
ChatGPT uses so-called generative AI to respond to text, speech or image prompts — a technological leap regarded by many in Silicon Valley as the most significant since the advent of the smartphone.
The exact reason for Altman’s ousting remains unclear, with OpenAI’s board saying only that he had not been “consistently candid”.
According to people familiar with the matter, his departure stemmed from concerns about his commitment to OpenAI’s mission of ensuring safe and beneficial AI.
A person with direct knowledge of the board’s decision said it had become “impossible to oversee” the co-founder.
“There was no one big problem,” the person added. “The board reached the point where they couldn’t believe what Sam told them.”
After talks with Altman broke down on Sunday, the OpenAI board appointed Emmett Shear, co-founder of video-streaming service Twitch, as interim chief executive.
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Shear, who has publicly called for a slower rollout of AI, tried to quell reports that a dispute over safety was part of the argument. “The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety,” he wrote on X. “I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercialising our awesome models.”
Nadella said his company remained committed to its partnership with OpenAI and was looking forward to “getting to know Emmett Shear and OpenAI’s new leadership team and working with them”.
Microsoft has committed more than $10bn in capital and infrastructure credits to OpenAI — though not all of that capital has been drawn down — and has embedded OpenAI’s powerful generative AI tools into its own software.
Microsoft’s shares rose more than 2 per cent on Monday, reversing losses from late on Friday after the announcement of Altman’s firing.
Altman told the Financial Times this month he planned to raise further investment from the Seattle group beyond the previous tranche of money, saying he had a “great partner” in Microsoft.