The CEO is suddenly out, where is OpenAI headed?

Author: Qi Minqian, Tiger Sniff

On the afternoon of November 17, US time, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced a blockbuster management adjustment. Sam Altman will step down as CEO and leave the company’s board of directors, and Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, with a full CEO still in the process.

As one of the founders of OpenAI, Sam Altman is known as the “father of ChatGPT” and has always been the one who stands in front of the stage to represent OpenAI.

The reason given by OpenAI in the announcement is that Altman’s departure was decided by the board of directors after deliberation, and his lack of honesty in communicating with the board of directors hindered the board’s ability to perform its duties, and the board has lost confidence in Altman’s leadership of OpenAI.

! [CEO is out suddenly, where is OpenAI headed?] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-69a80767fe-3fa70bf224-dd1a6f-cd5cc0.webp)

Screenshot from the official website

In response to the above changes, Altman made a simple response on his social media. To the effect that he loved his time at OpenAI… The next steps will be explained later.

What is the origin of the old and new CEOs?

Altman, the former CEO of OpenAI, is a “celebrity” in the global technology industry, in 2005, at the age of 19, Altman dropped out of Stanford University after a year of computer science, after which he started his own business, and in 2011 became a partner of Y Combinator, a well-known business incubator in the United States, and then became the president of YC Group. During his tenure as president of YC, he established YC China and invited Lu Qi to be the CEO.

In 2015, Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and others co-founded OpenAI, aiming to build safe and beneficial artificial general intelligence for the benefit of mankind. In 2019, YC announced that his role at YC would shift from president to chairman of the board in order for Altman to focus on OpenAI.

According to foreign media reports, Mira was promoted to OpenAI’s CTO in 2022, responsible for overseeing the commercialization of OpenAI’s products and improving them through user feedback.

According to OpenAI’s announcement, Mira has been on the company’s leadership team for five years and has a deep understanding of the company’s values, operations, and business. Mira was chosen as interim CEO because of her long tenure, close contact with all aspects of the company, and extensive experience in AI governance.

A six-person board becomes a four-person board

As a non-profit organization, the Board of Directors is the overall governing body of OpenAI. After this management change, its board of directors will also temporarily change from the original six-member board of directors to the current four-member board of directors.

According to OpenAI’s official website, there were 6 members on the board of directors of OpenAI, three of whom were active employees and three were non-active employees. The three current members of the board of directors are: Chairman and President Greg Brockman, former CEO Altman, and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever.

In the wake of this management upheaval, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, like Altman, was “ousted” from the board of directors, and then he announced that he would leave OpenAI altogether and no longer serve in the company.

According to OpenAI’s latest announcement, there are currently only four members left on the company’s board of directors, namely Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever and three other non-serving external board members.

! [CEO is out suddenly, where is OpenAI headed?] (https://img-cdn.gateio.im/webp-social/moments-69a80767fe-bd734f6806-dd1a6f-cd5cc0.webp)

Screenshot from the official website

OpenAI’s sudden management turmoil has caused the outside world to debate the company’s internal stance and factions. Although various speculations are still inconclusive, one thing is certain, OpenAI, which is at the forefront of artificial intelligence, still has a lot of room for improvement in company management.

In addition to internal management capabilities, another big debate about OpenAI comes from the conflict between non-profit and commercialization. When OpenAI was founded in 2015, it was a non-profit organization. However, the research of AI technology and its application is, after all, a project that requires a lot of capital investment. OpenAI started with a donation model, initially receiving $1 billion in pledges from YC and others, and later receiving a total of around $130 million in donations.

But those donations didn’t meet OpenAI’s needs, and in 2019, the company devised a “profit cap” structure, forming a new for-profit subsidiary under the nonprofit and receiving investment from Microsoft.

Affected by the OpenAI high-level earthquake, Microsoft’s U.S. stock market dived at the end of the day, and finally closed down nearly 1.7%. Microsoft announced that the company has a long-term cooperative relationship with OpenAI, abides by its investment commitment to OpenAI, and has “great confidence” in OpenAI.