‘OpenAI wants to rehire Sam Altman under pressure from investors’
OpenAI’s board of directors is said to be in discussions with Sam Altman to return to the company as CEO. The board is said to have been pressured by investors to reverse Altman’s dismissal.
According to Forbes, some investors, including Microsoft and Sequoia, have entered into discussions with senior OpenAI employees to determine how Altman can be brought back on board as CEO.
There was according to the editors of Forbes also a script on the table: senior employees would revolt against the board of directors over Altman’s dismissal, which would compromise the operation of OpenAI’s systems. The investors would then consider legal action, which would force members of the board of directors, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever and board member Adam D’Angelo, to resign.
It is not clear whether that plan will become reality and whether it is correct. Altman would according to The Verge have conflicting feelings about a return to OpenAI and, according to The Information, have already sat down with some investors to set up a new AI company. The board of directors is currently still in discussions with Altman and is reportedly “optimistic” about the man’s return. That stood according to The Information in a message to employees.
OpenAI’s board of directors had made the decision on Friday to fire CEO and co-founder Sam Altman. According to the council, Altman had not been consistently candid enough in his communications with the council. Co-founder Greg Brockman was also removed from the board of directors. He later announced that he had resigned. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, is now the interim CEO of the American AI company.
OpenAI is an American research institute specialized in artificial intelligence and language models. It was founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and several other tech entrepreneurs. OpenAI is known as the company behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT, AI image generator Dall-E and speech recognition software Whisper.