One AI giant’s loss is another AI giant’s gain, it seems.
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO, has announced that he has hired Sam Altman after the co-founder and CEO of Open AI was kicked out of his own company by the board last week for vague reasons, which, while unfortunate, has resulted in at least some sort of silver lining, with Altman now being tasked with leading the Windows maker’s AI research team.
Joining Altman at Microsoft will be some of his other colleagues, including Greg Brockman, another leading member of OpenAI who helped co-found the company years back in December 2015.
Here’s Nadella tweet, where he suggests that he isn’t “furious” at OpenAI, as coverage from Bloomberg might imply, but that he’s definitely using the shakeup to his advantage:
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 Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.
The OpenAI board was reportedly in discussions with Sam Altman to return as CEO, but apparently, that is no longer happening.
And here’s what OpenAI had to say about its leadership transition on Friday, when it named Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, as its interim CEO. (Emmett Shear, the ex-CEO and co-founder of Twitch, has seemingly replaced her as interim CEO already.)
Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
“OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period,” OpenAI’s board of directors added in a statement.
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
Discussion (14 replies)
Join Discussion →Seems like the AI masters have chosen their stooge. ;)
So, Microsoft is so desperate to make further inroads into AI that they are willing to turn a blind eye to the ethics violations that should have been enough to not make Altman employable ever again.
Tell me more... ( seriously)
I thought MS mostly used open AI stuff at least for their bing enhancements (?)
Details are limited, but from what I can tell the reason he was fired was for lying (possibly by omission) to the board about key business metrics, progress, finances, etc. That's not usually a recipe for getting second chances.
Sounds to me that he wanted to go to MS. MS had contractual ties with OpenAI preventing them from scalping employees in good standing. So Altman strategically tanked his OpenAI position to allow him to be hired by MS.
Just a guess mind you.
It was on the news this morning that most of Open AI's staff is ready to walkout over this.
Also the allegations that OpenAI was knowingly trained on a significant amount of copyrighted material without getting permission or giving proper credit/compensation. OpenAI claims Fair Use, since it was all avaliable in public view via scraping, but copyright holders claim it's not the case since it's being used for profit.
I think this is a huge issue for AI.
And quite frankly, I'm not a fan of scraping at all. In my humble opinion content posted online should be restricted to be used for only the purpose the poster had in mind when they posted it, and no other purpose unless express written permission is obtained.
I've probably posted hundreds of thousands of posts on public forums over the years, some of them possibly even helpful to people, and I sure as hell didn't do it so that some scummy AI developer could scrape them and roll them into their for profit product.
Maybe I should sue OpenAI as well? ;p
Scraping in general is sketchy. From the internet to whatever the heck systems telcoms use, I've seen way too many things that piss me off.
As of tonight Altman is back and the old board is out. The employees and interim ceo and cofounder all threatened to leave for the startup me was going to create for them. OpenAi would have been gutted with little to no expertise. Thankfully the old board.is out a new interim board is in to appoint all new board members with Microsoft having some key seats of course.
By that definition google is illegal also. It crawls sites and gives you results based on those, for profit..
I don’t necessarily disagree
I don't have a problem with them just providing links to content people are searching for, but when they summarize that content on the google search page, that is a potential problem.