Explained | Boardroom battle: Timeline of Sam Altman’s quick journey from OpenAI to Microsoft

On Thursday (Nov 16), when Sam Altman appeared on stage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Summit in downtown San Francisco, little did he know that would be his last public appearance as the CEO of OpenAI.

At 7:40 pm the same day, the tech wonderkind who is also the cofounder of the ambitious cryptocurrency Worldcoin, reportedly rushed to a meeting, without giving any further detail to his colleagues.

On Friday, the bombshell news broke that Altman was no longer the CEO of OpenAI, the revolutionary artificial intelligence firm behind ChatGPT. The company’s board of directors alleged that he was not being “consistently candid in his communications.”

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The four-member board said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

The news of Altman getting sacked by OpenAI left the company’s employees stunned, including the President and Co-Founder of OpenAI Greg Brockman.

Brockman was quick to tender his own resignation from the company on Saturday (Nov 18).

“Genuinely wishing you all nothing but the best,” Brockman wrote in his post on X. “I continue to believe in the mission of creating safe (artificial general intelligence) that benefits all of humanity,” he added.

A boardroom coup: Who fired Sam Altman?

OpenAI’s board consists of four people—co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, former GeoSim Systems CEO Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner, an alumnus of Open Philanthropy and the director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

None of them owns shares in the company, and neither does Sam Altman, apart from some indirect investments.

According to the report by Verge, Ilya Sutskever, who heads OpenAI’s research team, played a key role in the ousting of Altman.

It must be noted that OpenAI’s board is not tasked with maximising the company’s profits, as it is in the case of traditional companies. The motto of the board is to ensure the creation of “broadly beneficial” artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

According to reports, there was a battle simmering between two warring factions within the OpenAI. The other faction, led by Sutskeve, which focused on the dangers associated with the superintelligent AI, seems to have won.

Altman’s plans to launch a new venture

Soon after Altman was told to step down as OpenAI’s CEO, the news came that he and Brockman were already planning to ditch the ChatGPT parent and preparing to launch their own AI venture.

He was allegedly talking to investors regarding his new firm, which was still “in development”, reports said on Saturday. It was also anticipated that many of his old recruits at OpenAI could also join the new venture.

The news was never confirmed by Sam Altman. Additionally, OpenAI’s chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, made clear in a statement to the employees that Sam’s departure was over a “breakdown in communication between Sam and the board”, and not “malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices”.

More confusion

Adding to the confusion, The Verge reported on Saturday that OpenAI was in negotiations with Altman to return as the CEO.

On Sunday, Altman and Brockman met executives at the Open AI's San Francisco headquarters after being invited by interim CEO Mira Murati, according to a report by The Information.

Murati had plans to re-hire her ousted predecessor, a Bloomberg report claimed at the time.

However, Altman is believed to have firmly rejected the offer. He posted an image of himself at the company’s HQ holding a guest ID pass with the caption, “First and last time i ever wear one of these.”

Soon, Ilya Sutskever revealed in a statement to the company’s employees that ex-Twitch boss Emmett Shear will become the new interim CEO.

Microsoft comes into the picture

On Monday (Nov 20), Microsoft - which has integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine some months ago- announced that it was hiring both Sam Altman and Brockman to lead the company’s new advanced AI research team.

“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team,” announced CEO Satya Nadella on X.

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Altman also acknowledged he was joining Microsoft by reposting Nadella with the message “the mission continues.”

Microsoft has already built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia.

Also, Microsoft and OpenAI were already cooperating to refine and test the Maia AI chip, built specially to run large language models, a type of AI software that underpins Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service.

Being a former OpenAI boss, Altman is anyway no stranger to Microsoft. The tech giant already has a “multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, rumoured to be worth around $10 billion.

In fact, Microsoft is the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, and Microsoft’s cloud services power all OpenAI workloads across products, API services, and research.

So, Microsoft is also following developments at OpenAI very closely.

“We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them,” Nadella announced, hinting that Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI won’t change due to the recent leadership overhaul.

(With inputs from agencies)