(Specifies in the title that Altman is MD (not CEO), adds context)
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 21 (Reuters) – OpenAI said on Tuesday it had reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as chief executive days after his sudden ouster, ending frenzied discussions over the future of the creative start-up of ChatGPT software.
In addition to Sam Altman’s return, the company agreed to partially reorganize the board of directors that removed him from office. Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers are set to join Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, who was on the “original” board, OpenAI said. .
“I can’t wait to get back to OpenAI,” said Sam Altman on Platform X.
His return ends a tumultuous period during which Sam Altman agreed to join Microsoft, the main backer of OpenAI, to lead a new AI research team.
This announcement followed the rejection by the OpenAI board of directors of his first attempt to return to the start-up on Sunday, and the appointment of co-founder and former Twitch executive, Emmett Shear, to the position of CEO acting.
Emmett Shear welcomed the return of Sam Altman on the X platform, the result, according to him, of “72 hours of very intense work”.
The roots of the attempt to sideline Sam Altman from the start-up remain unclear, the board of directors having only mentioned at the time, without further details, a lack of frankness on the part of the manager in his communications.
COMMERCIAL LINE VICTORY?
According to analysts, his ouster illustrated the growing tensions between the supporters of the original line of OpenAI – a non-profit organization which says it aims to develop technology in the service of humanity -, embodied by the scientific head of the company and board member, Ilya Sutskever, and proponents of a more commercial approach desired by investors seeking financial returns, exemplified by the controversial ChatGPT software.
The brutality of the announcement, however, surprised even those within OpenAI and Microsoft, who reacted quickly to limit the damage by promising to hire Sam Altman as well as Greg Brockman, president of the start-up.
Greg Brockman, who resigned from OpenAI after Sam Altman’s ouster, declared on the X platform that he was “getting back to coding tonight.”
According to a letter seen by Reuters, almost all of OpenAI’s more than 700 employees had threatened to resign on Monday unless the board reinstated Sam Altman and Greg Brockman.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella welcomed the changes to OpenAI’s board of directors.
“We believe this is an essential first step on the path to more stable, better informed and more effective governance,” he said on X.
For the moment, Microsoft, which holds 49% of OpenAI’s capital, has not specified whether it would obtain a seat on the start-up’s board of directors as part of the reorganization.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Shivani Tanna in Bangalore; French version Lina Golovnya and Tangi Salaün, edited by Blandine Hénault)