For anyone who has been following the OpenAI debacle, it's been a long five days. Even if you haven't been paying attention, the drama that unfolded over the weekend will directly impact how you use technology in the near future, so it's worth understanding what's going on here.
As a brief recap, on Friday, the company's board fired its CEO, Sam Altman, over Google Meet without explaining its reasoning beyond that he had "not been consistently candid." That left a lot of room for people to wonder why the most important tech company in the world would push out the person who had become the primary ambassador and evangelist of A.I.
Then, over the weekend, Altman tried to get his job back with the help of pressure from investors, employees, and Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, who has basically bet the world's second-largest tech company's future on OpenAI's technology. It looked as though Altman and the board might reach a deal, only to have OpenAI announce that Emmett Shear, the former CEO and founder of Twitch, would become CEO instead. Nadella then announced that Altman and OpenAI's former president, Greg Brockman, would become Microsoft employees.
Almost all of OpenAI's employees then threatened to resign if the board didn't reconsider. Actually, they threatened to all go to Microsoft if the board didn't rehire Altman and then themselves resign.
On Tuesday, talks between Altman and the board resumed. By Wednesday morning, it was official: Altman was back as CEO. A new, three-member board has been appointed, led by Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce, who also served as the chair of the board at Twitter. Reportedly, the board is vetting candidates who will make up a larger, nine-member board.
I know that's a lot, and I'm leaving out even more. If you're interested in the drama, I highly recommend reading The Wall Street Journal's recap.
If you're not someone who spends that much time following tech companies, you might wonder why anyone cares this much about Silicon Valley drama. That's a reasonable thing to ask, but there's a simple answer: OpenAI isn't just the company with the fastest-growing tech product ever (ChatGPT), it's the most important tech company in the world right now.
And, even though Altman is back as CEO, and most of OpenAI's employees didn't have to resign, things aren't quite returning to normal. You don't go through this much in this short a period of time and expect things to go back to the way they were. In fact, I think there are a few things that are worth considering:
First, the most obvious thing is that OpenAI avoids what was looking like a total collapse. That's important because OpenAI is the undisputed leader in the space at this point. In the race to develop artificial intelligence capabilities, OpenAI has a significant lead over its rivals, including several of the biggest tech companies in the world like Google and Meta.
Since launching a year ago, ChatGPT has attracted more than 100 million monthly users and now generates $1 billion a year in revenue. It's hard to see a scenario where all of OpenAI's employees quit but the company manages to continue the pace of development it has had over the past year.
Second, Microsoft really did tie its future to OpenAI. You can argue whether that was wise--given the latter company's instability and corporate governance issues--but there's no way around it. Microsoft built ChatGPT into almost every software product it makes. It also offered it as an enterprise product to corporate customers through Azure, its cloud-computing platform.
There's a reason Nadella took such an active role in resolving the mess at OpenAI, and that's because of the existential risk it posed to all of his future plans for Microsoft. For now, they get back to working the plan, though Nadella has already said he expects changes in the way OpenAI is run in the future.
This leads to the last thing the whole ordeal means for OpenAI, which is its mission and structure. I'm not going to get into the complicated way the for-profit company is owned and controlled by a nonprofit organization that was--until this weekend--controlled by a board of independent directors whose mission was to make sure OpenAI was building A.I. that benefits all of humanity.
I will just say that I expect the structure of OpenAI is going to look a lot more like a normal company in the near future. If you ask investors for huge amounts of money to build the most important technology of the next 50 years, they will want to have some say in how the company is run. That OpenAI got this far without that being true is weird, but there's no way investors--especially its biggest investor, Microsoft--will let this happen again.
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