The drama around Sam Altman began, when OpenAI fired the CEO but the board of directors had to call him back due to protests by its workers. The company was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and others as a non-profit research lab. Its main goal was to benefit humanity as a whole by developing artificial intelligence. Doing so without any profits so just earn money to pay all the things they had to spend money on and not make any financial return. In 2018 though Musk quit after saying he is going to invest $50 million. On top of that the leaders grew increasingly aware of the costs of the technology for those systems.
How did the company grow with Sam Altman
After setting their goal of being a non-profit company, OpenAI tried their best to develop the best systems of artificial intelligence. It had the purpose of being “safe and beneficial”. The company had pledged over $1 billion to the venture and since the start in 2015 it developed multiple systems. After that Co-founder Elon Musk left in 2018 due to a conflict of interests since Tesla was developing an artificial intelligence itself. Systems that werre developed by OpenAI are GPT-1,2,3,4, ChatGPT, Dall-E, OpenAI Five and OpenAI Codex. A year after Musk left though, the company transitioned to a for-profit model and there are plants to become publicly traded. This might be one of the reasons Sam Altman got fired recently. Yet we don’t know exactly why he was fired though. The company got multiple offers from big companies because of their rise and other wanting to participate. That underlined the way OpenAI is going. Not as planned as a non-profit organization but rather another company that lives of other investors.
The recent drama including Sam Altman at OpenAI
On November 17, Sam Altman got fired by the board of directors of OpenAI. The company said that “Sam’s behavior and lack of transparency” was the cause for the move of the officials. Altman then gave the board until 5 p.m. on November 19 to resign for him to come back. Just a few hours after the deadline, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced Altman was joining the tech giant. After that 702 out of 770 employees of OpenAI demanded OpenAI to bring back Sam Altman as CEO or they would leave. Due to that the company had to assemble a new board and short after that Sam Altman returned as CEO. Only one former board member sits on the new one as well. Adam D’Angelo, CEO of the Q&A site Quora. This despite the fact that he voted for Altman’s ouster.
What does Elon Musk have to do with the recent drama
After the recent dismissal of Altman Elon Musk uttered some serious concerns about the security and possible dangers of OpenAI and AI as a whole. He also mentioned in the past that he is concerned on the companies possible impact on society. Since it has full control over the information and possible disinformation of everyone that uses their platforms or apps. Musk responded to a post on X from former Yammer CEO David Sacks with “given the risk and power of advanced AI, the public should be informed of why the board felt they had to take such drastic action.”
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