“We are extremely excited to announce that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will join Microsoft to lead the new Advanced Artificial Intelligence research team,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced today.
The dismissed head of OpenAI Altman and the former head of the company’s board of directors, Greg Brockman, are moving to Microsoft.
OpenAI’s board surprisingly fired Altman on Friday, in response to the departure of Brockman and some other researchers, such as Szymon Sidor. According to The Information, OpenAI will be temporarily led by the former head of Twitch, Emmett Shear. This was also confirmed by the head of Microsoft Nadella in his contribution on the X network today. “We look forward to meeting and working with Emmett Shear and the new OpenAI leadership,” he wrote.
We wrote
The founder and CEO of the revolutionary company OpenAI Sam Altman was fired on Friday. But in the end, everything can end up completely differently, as investors, including Microsoft, are pushing for its return.
Major OpenAI Investors lobbied for his return after Altman’s resignation. They feared that Altman’s departure could cause an outflow of talent from the company and complicate the upcoming stock sale, which would value OpenAI at $86 billion (CZK 1.9 trillion), Reuters reported.
Board member and OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever told employees that board members stand by their decision to fire Altman and that his behavior and communications with the board undermine the company’s ability to oversee AI development.
We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett…
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 20, 2023
Shear is the co-founder of Amazon-owned video sharing platform Twitch. He resigned from his post at the beginning of this year. According to Bloomberg, he won OpenAI’s board because he recognizes the threats posed by artificial intelligence. He spent over ten years building Twitch.
OpenAI launched its ChatGPT chatbot about a year ago, triggering widespread interest in generative artificial intelligence and competition among tech firms in the industry. The term generative artificial intelligence refers to systems that, based on training on a huge amount of data, can create seemingly original outputs in the form of texts or images in response to user input.
Altman was the face of the rise of OpenAI and is considered by many to be the face of the entire artificial intelligence industry, the BBC wrote. Among other things, Altman testified before the US Congress as part of a hearing that looked at the opportunities and risks associated with AI.
