Microsoft hires Sam Altman 3 days after OpenAI fired him as CEO

Microsoft announced Monday that it has hired Sam Altman and another co-founder of ChatGPT maker OpenAI after they unexpectedly departed the company days earlier in a corporate shakeup that shocked the artificial intelligence world.

Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella said Microsoft, the major investor in OpenAI — which was behind the chatbot that kicked off the generative AI craze — looked “forward to getting to know” OpenAI’s new chief executive, former Twitch leader Emmett Shear, and the rest of OpenAI’s management team.

Nadella wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Microsoft was “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.”

Altman said “the mission continues,” in reply to Nadella on X.

Shear also took to X to confirm his appointment as OpenAI’s new CEO, writing Monday that, “Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become the interim CEO of @OpenAI. After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just a few hours, I accepted.”

At the end of a long post, he added a denial that OpenAI fired Altman due to concerns about AI’s dangers.

“Before I took the job,” Shear wrote, “I checked on the reasoning behind the change. The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I’m not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”

OpenAI said Friday that Altman was pushed out after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors, which had lost confidence in his ability to lead OpenAI.

Altman catapulted ChatGPT to global fame while serving as company CEO and in the past year has become Silicon Valley’s sought-after voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence.

OpenAI last week had announced co-founder Brockman would step down as board chairman but remain on as president. Brockman followed with a post on X reprinting a message he sent to OpenAI employees in which he wrote, “based on today’s news, I quit.”

In another X post Friday night, Brockman said Altman was asked to join a video meeting with the company’s board members in which co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever informed Altman he was being fired.

Brockman added that he was informed of his removal from the board in a separate call with Sutskever a short time later.

“Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” Brockman wrote on X.

Based in San Francisco, the technology startup founded in 2015 released online chatbot ChatGPT about a year ago, setting off an AI boom that made Altman famous and landed him meetings with President Joe Biden and other leaders. 

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and image generator Dall-E brought generative AI into the mainstream, while also stirring debate about the technology’s potential for replacing workers in a range of jobs and further blurring the line between content produced by machines and by people. OpenAI has also found itself the target of multiple lawsuits by authors, artists and others creators alleging that the company’s technology copied their work. 

As CEO, Altman led a transformation of a little-known startup into a company engaged in talks to sell employee shares to investors at a valuation in excess of $80 billion, according to media outlets including Bloomberg News and The New York Times.

Outspoken and known for stirring controversy, Altman has also attracted attention for sounding the alarm about AI’s potential threat to humanity.