Just as quickly as he left, Sam Altman has returned to Open AI

The Shocking Dismissal of Sam Altman

It was a shock for everyone when Sam Altman's firing was announced. Everyone believed that OpenAI would become a company of the past, and rightly so, most are now afraid to rely too much on any one AI company.

So, on Friday, November 17, 2023, the board of directors of OpenAI announced that they had fired Altman as CEO, following a “deliberative review process” that concluded he was not “consistently candid” in his communications with the board.

The company published a blog titled "OpenAI announces leadership transition," in which it stated that Altman would leave following "a deliberative review process by the board of directors, which concluded that he was not consistently sincere in his communications."

However, the real reason for Altman's departure is still unknown.

After firing him, the board moved to appoint an interim CEO: first, the Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and then Emmett Shear, the former head of the Amazon-owned streaming platform, Twitch.

The Return of Altman

After his dismissal, Altman quickly aligned himself for a position at Microsoft, where he was set to lead an AI research team. The tech giant, based in Redmond, Washington, has an ongoing relationship with OpenAI, agreeing earlier this year to invest 10 billion U.S. dollars in it - a bid to compete with other major players in the effervescent AI market.

But many at OpenAI wanted Altman back. Over 700 of the company's employees signed a letter calling for the board to resign and reinstate the former executive. If their ultimatum was not met, they threatened to follow Altman to Microsoft, which had offered to hire them all.

So, by the evening of November 21, Altman was back inside as if none of this had ever happened. He was to be joined by a newly reconstituted board that would keep D'Angelo, the Quora executive, and also include the former co-CEO of Salesforce, Bret Taylor, and former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.

What does this mean for AI companies in general?

Obviously, this event caused panic among companies using OpenAI's applications, prompting many of them to review their options and not to trust just one AI company.