Sam Altman’s Ousting Wreaks Havoc in Silicon Valley

Sam Altman was fired by the board of OpenAI last weekend, creating chaos in the rapidly growing tech and AI development industry. The board announced their decision in a blog post on Friday, stating their conclusion that, “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” This came as a shock to the employees of OpenAI, and to its investors, who were not consulted about the decision and found out about it via social media. On Sunday, Microsoft hired Altman, but after days of negotiation, he is back at OpenAI. 

Throughout the chaotic weekend, many theories about Altman’s firing have surfaced. The most common speculation is that the decision has to do with two of the four board members, Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, and their ties to the Effective Altruism movement. Effective Altruism is a philosophy that promotes using logic and reason to help people as much as possible, and within the AI research field, has become a movement that seeks to slow down AI development in the hopes of avoiding global catastrophe at the hands of dangerously intelligent AI technology. Sam Altman is not an advocate of this ideology, and is known as an “accelerationist”, or someone who believes that AI technology development should be pursued at all costs. According to Peter Coy of The New York Times, “the apparent disagreement between Altman and the OpenAI board [was] about how to steer artificial intelligence research so A.I. doesn’t destroy the human race.” It’s easy to see why this would cause a rift between Altman and the board, especially as Altman pursued AI development more and more aggressively. 

Another theory indicates Altman’s entrepreneurial pursuits. While Sam Altman is primarily known for founding OpenAI, he is also involved in several other projects and investments and owns twelve other startups. From the board’s perspective, this is a risky situation. One misstep by Altman and the company could be caught up in his messy financial entanglements. 

On Sunday, just hours after the board announced OpenAI’s interim CEO, Microsoft hired Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, a cofounder of OpenAI who resigned in solidarity with Altman. Microsoft and OpenAI have a long-standing partnership, thanks to Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI of over 13 billion dollars. Brockman and Altman were hired to lead an advanced AI research lab at Microsoft, a decision that makes a lot of sense for the two, who would likely have access to unlimited funds and equipment; access that they would not have if they decided to restart OpenAI on their own. This would have been the plan, if OpenAI had not rehired Altman on Tuesday, a decision that was reached after several changes to the board. Helen Toner, who wrote a research paper criticizing OpenAI’s lack of safety in its development, has been removed, as well as Tasha McCauley and Ilya Sutskever. Adam D’Angelo, the founder of Quora, is the only member of the original board who remains.