21/11/2023 (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) - Almost all of OpenAI's employees had threatened to quit and follow ousted leader Sam Altman to work at the company's biggest investor, Microsoft Corp, unless the current board resigned, leaving the future of the high-profile artificial intelligence startup increasingly uncertain.
More than 700 of the AI firm's roughly 770 employees had signed a letter on Monday addressed to OpenAI's board, stating that the signatories were "unable to work for or with people that lacked competence, judgment, and care for our mission and employees." The letter had called for every member of the board to resign and for Altman to be reinstated, or else employees might jump to Microsoft. The software giant had assured them that there were positions for all OpenAI employees, as stated in the letter.
The extraordinary threat of a mass exodus followed a roller-coaster weekend during which OpenAI's board had defied calls from its investors and top executives to reinstate Altman, who had been fired following disagreements with the board on how fast to develop and monetize artificial intelligence. OpenAI executives, including then-interim CEO Mira Murati, chief operating officer Brad Lightcap, and chief strategy officer Jason Kwon, had been negotiating with the board to bring Altman back to the company into Sunday night, according to a source familiar with the discussions, who requested anonymity while discussing private information. Instead, the board had named a new leader, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, and Microsoft had hired Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to head up a new in-house AI team.
The chaos inside OpenAI could reshape the world of artificial intelligence. OpenAI had initiated the global frenzy around generative AI with the launch of its hugely popular chatbot ChatGPT a year ago. With Altman as its figurehead, OpenAI had been at the center of the tech industry's efforts to deploy this technology to businesses and consumers, as well as to work with regulators on guardrails for AI. However, the tension at OpenAI raised new questions about whether AI startups could balance developing AI responsibly alongside the need to raise vast amounts of capital from investors to support the expensive computing infrastructure required to build these tools.
OpenAI's turmoil could also set off a race by other tech companies to poach highly-competitive AI talent. Salesforce Inc chief executive officer Marc Benioff had offered on Monday to immediately employ researchers resigning from their posts at OpenAI. Salesforce would provide matching compensation to any researcher who had quit OpenAI, as Benioff had mentioned in a post on X.
Among the many employees and executives who had signed the letter were Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer who had been named interim CEO on Friday, and Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and board member who had been seen as instrumental in the board's actions.
"I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions," Sutskever had written in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday. "I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together, and I will do everything I can to reunite the company."