Sam Altman's firing and rehiring saga

OpenAI has gone through a lot in the past week. On November 17, the AI company announced it had fired CEO Sam Altman citing a 'lack of confidence in his aptitude' to continue leading OpenAI. The action was met with uproar and employees of the company signed an open letter to get Altman back. 700 of the 770 employees threatened to quit the organization. In the meantime, Emmet Shear who was previously with Twitch stepped in as the acting CEO of OpenAI. 

The employees who were on the verge of quitting received offers of up to $1 million exacerbating the pressure on OpenAI to take action.

Sam Altman later expressed interest in joining the new AI research team at Microsoft. Microsoft owns a major share of 49% in OpenAI and later, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed hiring Altman. 

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

The three-person board consisting of chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner received a lot of backlash for the sudden firing of Altman without any justification.

Post all the backlash and employees threatening to quit, on November 22, just five days after laying off Altman, OpenAI announced the re-hiring of Sam Altman as the CEO under a new set of board members. 

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) November 22, 2023