OpenAI on Tuesday said it had reached an agreement for Sam Altman to return as CEO, days after his ouster, capping frenzied discussions about the future of the start-up at the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom.
In addition to Altman’s return, the company agreed in principle to partly reconstitute the board of directors that had dismissed him, with former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and former US secretary of the treasury Larry Summers joining Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, OpenAI said.
“[I]’m looking forward to returning to openai,” Altman wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
Photo: Reuters
The board had given few details explaining Altman’s firing on Friday, other than his lack of candor and its need to defend OpenAI’s mission developing AI to benefit humanity.
The deal to restore Altman ushers in a potentially new era for the start-up, a non-profit, which long juggled concerns among staff about AI’s dangers and its potential for commercialization.
Tuesday’s reshuffle appeared to favor Altman and financial backer Microsoft Corp, which is rolling out OpenAI’s technology to business customers globally.
In a statement on X, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella welcomed the changes to OpenAI’s board.
“We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance,” he wrote.
Altman’s return also caps a tumultuous weekend that saw him agree to head a new research team at Microsoft, which has invested billions of US dollars in OpenAI and given it the computing power necessary for its technology.
That followed a rejection by OpenAI’s board of his first attempt to return to the start-up, on Sunday, by naming Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear as interim CEO.
“While it’s still unclear exactly what the tug-of-war prompting his initial departure involved, Sam Altman’s views about how to run the company will dominate future direction, especially given he’ll be supervised under a new board,” said Susannah Streeter, head of money and markets at Hargreaves Lansdown PLC.
Shear celebrated the late-night outcome on Tuesday on X, saying it followed “~72 very intense hours of work.”
“This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved,” Shear wrote.
Altman’s dismissal had brought uncertainty for OpenAI and Microsoft alike, which had moved quickly to control damage over the weekend by vowing to hire him and OpenAI president Greg Brockman.
Brockman, who had quit after Altman was ousted, wrote on X that he was “getting back to coding tonight.”
Nearly all of OpenAI’s more than 700 staff on Monday had threatened to leave unless the board stepped down and reinstated Altman, a letter reviewed by Reuters said.
Following this show of solidarity, Altman wrote on X: “we have more unity and commitment and focus than ever before.”
CHIP WAR: Tariffs on Taiwanese chips would prompt companies to move their factories, but not necessarily to the US, unleashing a ‘global cross-sector tariff war’ US President Donald Trump would “shoot himself in the foot” if he follows through on his recent pledge to impose higher tariffs on Taiwanese and other foreign semiconductors entering the US, analysts said. Trump’s plans to raise tariffs on chips manufactured in Taiwan to as high as 100 percent would backfire, macroeconomist Henry Wu (吳嘉隆) said. He would “shoot himself in the foot,” Wu said on Saturday, as such economic measures would lead Taiwanese chip suppliers to pass on additional costs to their US clients and consumers, and ultimately cause another wave of inflation. Trump has claimed that Taiwan took up to
A start-up in Mexico is trying to help get a handle on one coastal city’s plastic waste problem by converting it into gasoline, diesel and other fuels. With less than 10 percent of the world’s plastics being recycled, Petgas’ idea is that rather than letting discarded plastic become waste, it can become productive again as fuel. Petgas developed a machine in the port city of Boca del Rio that uses pyrolysis, a thermodynamic process that heats plastics in the absence of oxygen, breaking it down to produce gasoline, diesel, kerosene, paraffin and coke. Petgas chief technology officer Carlos Parraguirre Diaz said that in
Japan intends to closely monitor the impact on its currency of US President Donald Trump’s new tariffs and is worried about the international fallout from the trade imposts, Japanese Minister of Finance Katsunobu Kato said. “We need to carefully see how the exchange rate and other factors will be affected and what form US monetary policy will take in the future,” Kato said yesterday in an interview with Fuji Television. Japan is very concerned about how the tariffs might impact the global economy, he added. Kato spoke as nations and firms brace for potential repercussions after Trump unleashed the first salvo of
SUPPORT: The government said it would help firms deal with supply disruptions, after Trump signed orders imposing tariffs of 25 percent on imports from Canada and Mexico The government pledged to help companies with operations in Mexico, such as iPhone assembler Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密), also known as Foxconn Technology Group (富士康科技集團), shift production lines and investment if needed to deal with higher US tariffs. The Ministry of Economic Affairs yesterday announced measures to help local firms cope with the US tariff increases on Canada, Mexico, China and other potential areas. The ministry said that it would establish an investment and trade service center in the US to help Taiwanese firms assess the investment environment in different US states, plan supply chain relocation strategies and
RSS