The suspense lasted for a weekend. After what we imagine were tough negotiations, the return of Sam Altman, former CEO of OpenAI, is no longer considered by the board of directors.
It’s a corporate drama playing out in fast-forward at OpenAI. After the surprise ousting of Sam Altman on Friday the 24th, the appointment of an interim CEO over the weekend and the opening of negotiations to bring this same Sam Altman back to his former position, the star AI company will have to do without its charismatic leader. According to the media The Information, the negotiations over the weekend yielded nothing and OpenAI will therefore continue without its historic co-founder.
Yet another new CEO
The management committee, which had fired Sam Altman due to a lack of confidence in his ability to lead and which half-heartedly accused him of having lied on certain critical subjects, finally chose to hire, at least temporarily, Emmet Shear as replacement. The latter will succeed Mira Murati, the technical director of OpenAI who took the reins of the company for a weekend.
Emmet Shear is best known for serving as the co-founder and CEO of Twitch until March 2023. Under his leadership, Twitch grew into the online video juggernaut it is today and sold Amazon for almost $1 billion. Emmet Shear was also a business coach within the startup incubator Y Combinator which was chaired by… Sam Altman between 2014 and 2019.
His appointment to the role of CEO of OpenAI therefore seals the fate of Sam Altman who will not return to the head of the company he co-founded, barring yet another twist of events. It is also a massive disavowal for Microsoft and its CEO Satya Nadella, who threw all his weight during the weekend to bring back the former CEO. As a reminder, Microsoft invested more than 10 billion in OpenAI, which gave the software giant a certain weight in the negotiations, but this clearly will not have been enough.
OpenAI in turmoil
Short-lived CEO Mira Murati even tried to bring Altman, and the company’s other co-founder Greg Brockman, back to different positions within the company in order to appease disgruntled investors, but the idea came up empty.
A good part of the shareholders actually hoped to see the former CEO return, as did many OpenAI employees. It remains to be seen whether the appointment of Emmet Shear will ease tensions or whether Silicon Valley’s darling company will experience a massive exodus of talent and a drying up of its finances. Whatever the case, the firm’s setbacks have not stopped making headlines.
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Created by OpenAI, ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot powered by the latest generation GPT-4 language model. By leveraging deep learning and artificial intelligence technologies, this chatbot has the ability to decipher and understand user requests. Thanks to its ability to generate text in an ingenious way, ChatGPT offers tailored and relevant responses, ensuring smooth chat interaction and an optimized user experience.
Source : The Information
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