While most of us spent the past weekend planning menus for our turkey feasts and bracing for awkward Thanksgiving weekend hometown encounters, one of the most buzzed-about Silicon Valley startups became embroiled in scandal we haven’t seen since Succession. Seemingly out of nowhere, OpenAI sacked CEO Sam Altman, who has been leading the company as it developed ChatGPT and other AI tools.
The boardroom drama isn’t just a tech story. Generative AI tools have been rapidly adopted by adland this past year, and it seems hard to understate the excitement from advertisers and agencies about the potential for the tech. Tech juggernauts like Google and Meta have augmented their ad tools with AI features, and certain streaming platforms, like Tubi, have integrated it into their recommendations tools. with potential implications for advertising
At the heart of it all is OpenAI, which built ChatGPT, and which is now being implemented across the industry. Where Altman and his deputies end up going could have widespread implications.
While the smoke is still clearing around OpenAI, we’ve attempted to distill the last few days’ happenings into a timeline that even non-techies can follow.
Friday: News breaks that Altman had been fired. The majority of the OpenAI board voted him out, reportedly over disagreements around how fast the company was growing and how issues around AI safety should be handled. At the time, the board claimed it fired Altman because he was not being “consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
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After the firing, Greg Brockman, who said he was not involved in the vote to oust Altman and was notified that he had been removed from the board on Friday afternoon, quit in solidarity with Altman. CTO Mira Murati is named interim CEO.
Saturday: After blowback over Altman’s ousting, negotiations between Altman and OpenAI begin with the goal of potentially bringing him back. Altman is reportedly seeking governance changes at OpenAI if he is to rejoin. Altman has the support of OpenAI investor Microsoft’s chairman and CEO Satya Nadella.
Monday: After negotiations seemingly don’t pan out, Nadella announces on X that Microsoft has hired Altman, Brockman, and other ex-OpenAI employees to lead a new AI research team.
Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Amazon-owned livestreaming platform Twitch, which he co-founded, announces on X that he has been named interim CEO of OpenAI, attracting immediate scrutiny. Murati returns to her position as CTO.
OpenAI Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, one of the board members who voted to oust Altman, takes to X, writing that “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions.” Hundreds of OpenAI employees sign a letter saying they will resign and join Microsoft’s newly created AI team unless OpenAI’s board steps down and the company reinstates Altman and Brockman.
Microsoft, for its part, appeared to clock a major win: Its stock price hit an all-time high on Monday after it announced it had hired Altman‚—but Nadella suggested that Altman could still return to OpenAI in some capacity.