WHO HAS THE LAST LAUGH- Sam Altman will be joining Microsoft. In the latest twist to his sudden firing on Friday, the former CEO of OpenAI will lead a team for advanced AI research,Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X this morning.

THREE CEOS IN THREE DAYS-

In an undignifying reshuffle, Mira Murati, former CTO of OpenAI, took the interim position, as announced by the board on Friday, after Altman was removed from his CEO post, says CNBC.

Former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear was appointed interim CEO of OpenAI today, despite pushback from employees and investors to reinstate Altman and former president and chairman Greg Brockman, who had resigned in response to the board’s decision, according to Axios.

ICYMI-

#1- Altman was suddenly ousted by the board on Friday for not being “consistently candid in his communications with the board,” as quoted in Bloomberg.

#2-It appears that concerns with the speed at which Altman and Brockman wanted OpenAI to grow was also alarming the board, which is reportedly mostly made up of scientists.

They recently suspended sign-ups to their ChatGPT Plus services to respond to the flood of client requests after the company’s first developer conference on 6 November, citing that the questions use extremely expensive computing power to implement their queries, tells us Bloomberg.

#3- Investors were in a frenzy, especially Microsoft. And with good reason, with its USD 10 bn stake in the startup and the resulting 2% drop in their share price on Friday, and another percentage point drop in after-hours trading, they had every reason to put pressure to reinstate Altman, reports the Financial Times.

WHAT REALLY WENT DOWN-

#1- There is beef between Altman and board member Ilya Sutskever, Chief Science Officer at OpenAI. Things got tense when Altman moved to reduce Sutskever’s role at the company, says Bloomberg, causing the rest of the board, Adam D’Angelo (Quora Inc. CEO), Tasha McCauley (tech entrepreneur), and Helen Toner (director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology), aside from Brockman, to turn their backs on Altman.

#2-It seems to have started atthe company’s first developer conference on Monday, 6 November. Where Altman had the crowd enthralled but made a few announcements that rubbed Sutskever the wrong way,including plans for customized versions of ChatGPT that would allow anyone to create chatbots to perform personalized tasks, reports the Bloomberg.In the coming days is when Sustkever brought his concerns to the board and the plan to sack Altman was put in the works.

WHAT’S NEXT- Shear has promised an independent investigation into Altman’s rushed ouster, which he said was “badly” conducted.He also added that he’ll be conferring with stakeholders in an effort to reform OpenAI’s leadership, Shear is quoted as saying in Bloomberg.

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