San Francisco: In a dramatic turn of events, OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company behind the popular ChatGPT platform, announced that its co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will resume their roles as CEO and President, respectively. The announcement came just four days after the previous board of OpenAI had fired both of them from their positions, citing a loss of confidence in their leadership.
According to a statement issued by OpenAI on Tuesday night, the company has reached an agreement in principle to bring back Altman and Brockman through a new interim board, which will oversee the transition to a permanent board in the next few months. The new interim board will consist of Brett Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce, Larry Summers, the former US Secretary of the Treasury, and Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of Quora. The statement also said that the new board will support the vision and mission of OpenAI and its partnership with Microsoft, which invested $1 billion in the company in 2019.
The statement did not provide any details on the reasons behind the sudden ouster and reinstatement of Altman and Brockman, who founded OpenAI in 2015 with a group of prominent tech entrepreneurs and researchers, including Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Ilya Sutskever. The company’s goal is to create and ensure the safe and beneficial use of general and superintelligent AI, which can perform any intellectual task that humans can. One of the company’s most notable achievements is ChatGPT, a platform that uses a large-scale neural network to generate natural language texts for various purposes, such as chatbots, summarization, translation, and creative writing.
Altman and Brockman expressed their gratitude and excitement for returning to OpenAI in a joint blog post on Wednesday. They wrote, “We are thrilled to be back at OpenAI and to continue working on our ambitious vision of creating artificial intelligence that can benefit humanity without causing harm or being misused. We are grateful to the new board for their trust and support, and to our amazing team for their resilience and dedication. We are also thankful to Microsoft for their continued partnership and collaboration, which has been instrumental in advancing our research and development.”
They also apologized for the confusion and disruption caused by the board shakeup and promised to communicate more transparently and effectively with the OpenAI community and stakeholders. They said, “We acknowledge that the last few days have been difficult and stressful for everyone involved, and we apologize for any inconvenience or harm that we may have caused. We realize that we have made some mistakes and that we have a lot to learn and improve. We are committed to listening to feedback, addressing concerns, and building trust and confidence with our employees, partners, customers, and supporters. We hope that you will join us in this journey and help us shape the future of AI for the greater good.”
