Turmoil at OpenAI: Now that Sam Altman’s coming back, what’s next for the creators of ChatGPT?

This Wall Street Journal article about the recent drama at OpenAI contains an amazing anecdote. Apparently an employee at AI rival Anthropic thought it’d be funny to send “thousands of paper clips in the shape of OpenAI’s logo” as a prank, in reference to the infamous paperclip maximizer thought experiment.

Weirdly, I think OpenAI’s logo makes for a great paperclip design. Should we be worried?

Reports from Reuters and The Information Wednesday night detail an OpenAI model called Q* (pronounced Q Star) that was recently demonstrated internally and is capable of solving simple math problems. Doing grade school math may not seem impressive, but the reports note that, according to the researchers involved, it could be a step toward creating artificial general intelligence (AGI).

After the publishing of the Reuters report, which said senior exec Mira Murati told employees that a letter about Q* “precipitated the board’s actions” to fire Sam Altman last week, OpenAI spokesperson Lindsey Held Bolton refuted that notion in a statement shared with The Verge: “Mira told employees what the media reports were about but she did not comment on the accuracy of the information.”

Separately, a person familiar with the matter told The Verge that the board never received a letter about such a breakthrough and that the company’s research progress didn’t play a role in Altman’s sudden firing.

The drama continues!

Here’s a brief update on where things stand with OpenAI today, after an explosive weekend and a very confusing Monday which saw the news of Sam Altman going to Microsoft slowly fade into Satya Nadella not seeming so sure that would happen.

— We’re told Altman still wants to return to OpenAI and continues to negotiate with the board today.

— As Bloomberg reported late last night, new interim CEO Emmett Shear is involved in mediating these negotiations, creating the frankly unprecedented situation where (1) the interim CEO who replaced (2) the interim CEO who replaced Sam and who (3) got replaced for trying to get Sam back is now (4) deeply involved in a new effort to get Sam back. Read it through a few times, it’s fine. It doesn’t make any sense to anyone else either.

— Microsoft’s offer to hire everyone who threatened to quit is still on the table, and has now been made officially public, after being noted in the employee walkout letter yesterday. In general, Microsoft appears to have receded from the situation; Nadella remains in the mix but has now made several media appearances reiterating that he’ll will work with Altman and OpenAI “irrespective of configuration,” which frankly sounds like he’s talking about the benefits of plug and play device drivers in Windows. We all fall back to what we know.

— We are told everyone, including the board, is trying to be reasonable, and put OpenAI back together.

We’ll keep posting updates as we have them; at the very least we can say the overall temperature has dropped, but it’s not clear any of this results in an actual return.

Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott says the software maker will match OpenAI’s compensation to employees that want to join Sam Atlman’s new AI research lab. It comes shortly after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella went on a media tour last night and didn’t seem to know if Sam Altman will actually join Microsoft or not. Competitors like Salesforce have been trying to tempt OpenAI employees to join rival AI projects.

Several days after Sam Altman was removed from his post as OpenAI’s CEO, there is still no resolution to the issue, even after hundreds of employees signed a pledge to follow him to Microsoft unless he’s reinstated.

Now, Bloomberg reports that global affairs VP Anna Makanju sent a memo to staff confirming that negotiations have continued between Altman, the remaining board members, and new interim CEO Emmett Shear, they won’t have a final response tonight and plan to continue discussions on Tuesday morning.

As hundreds of employees threaten to quit unless Sam Altman’s firing is rolled back:

The Information reports that before interim CEO Emmett Shear took the job, OpenAI’s remaining board members offered it to two others: former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and Scale AI CEO Alex Wang. Both turned it down. (Update: And in another report, it says board members also pursued the CEO of its competitor Anthropic, Dario Amodei, and proposed a merger between the two companies.)

From Business Insider there’s a report Ilya Sutskever gave employees two explanations for Altman’s firing: that he gave two people the same project and that he allegedly gave two board members different opinions about a member of personnel.

Finally, the Wall Street Journal writes that Sutskever, one of the board members who voted to fire Altman, switched to asking for Altman’s return “after an emotionally charged conversation with Anna Brockman, Greg Brockman’s wife” and notes he officiated their civil ceremony at OpenAI’s offices in 2019.

We tried to just tell the story in order, which is tough to do. Then we tried to figure out how this happened, what it means, and what might happen next. Grab the audio for your preferred podcast app right here.

And because this story won’t stop, we didn’t even get all the news – because one outcome we didn’t think of is that Sam Altman might go back to OpenAI after all. Sure!

No, really: this does not surprise me at all! Unlike 404’s Jason Koebler, I did in fact read early parts of blogger and AI “doomer” Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality — it was known in nerd/fan circles, not just the effective altruist movement, and at least initially was built around the pretty funny conceit of “applying cold hyperlogic to the quirks of a children’s fantasy series.” I did not get nearly far enough to reach the namecheck of Emmett Shear, OpenAI’s new CEO.

Microsoft employees are waking up to the surprise news of former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman joining them as a colleague. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella says Altman is joining to lead a new advanced AI research team, but he’s not yet showing up in Microsoft’s corporate directory according to multiple sources. He’s still marked as an OpenAI guest. Once he’s fully onboarded Altman will have a CEO title inside Microsoft and could be set to hire hundreds of OpenAI employees who have threatened to resign.

📩 Do you know more about Microsoft’s plans for its new AI research team? You can reach me confidentially on the Signal messaging app: +442081230413, or through email (tom@theverge.com).

OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who reportedly led the push to fire Sam Altman, which kicked off an entire weekend of shenanigans including three CEOs in three days and Altman joining OpenAI financial backer Microsoft, has regrets. In a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, he writes:

I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.

Moments after Sutskever’s post, newly-minted Microsoft exec Sam Altman quoted the post with a heart.

OpenAI’s workforce is voicing complaints on X (formerly Twitter) following the ousting of former CEO Sam Altman and the confirmation on Sunday that he wouldn’t be re-instated.

“Every single person whose ever told me to trust them on blind faith has been a liar,” said OpenAI technical staff member Brydon Eastman in a now-deleted post. “A chief scientist should [k]now this better than anyone.”

That’s a big deal in itself. Microsoft typically uses the CEO title for the leaders of big divisions like Microsoft Gaming, or acquired companies like LinkedIn and GitHub. Altman as the CEO of a new advanced AI research team signals to me that Microsoft is treating this like a big acquisition, which makes sense when you consider that a number of OpenAI employees are joining Altman at Microsoft.

Bloomberg is now reporting that interim CEO Mira Murati is trying to re-hire Altman and former president Greg Brockman in some sort of role, all while the board is trying to replace her as CEO. It is a mess — and keep in mind that the clock is ticking for Microsoft, which definitely wants to have a clear and convincing statement for its shareholders when the markets open tomorrow morning. Vibe check: bad.

Even as Murati works to bring Altman and Brockman back, members of the OpenAI board are also seeking to hire their own CEO to succeed Altman, a person with direct knowledge of the search said. Picking a different CEO would come as a stinging rebuke to investors, led by Microsoft Corp. and Thrive Capital, who have urged the board to step down and want Altman reinstated.

The NYT has been updating its piece on the OpenAI negotiations all day — the paper of record has a reporter staked out in front of the building, so we know what delivery is being ordered. It is very funny that a bunch of people concerned with existential AI risk are ordering McDs!

As deliberations continued on Sunday, executives at OpenAI called in resources. At 12:45 p.m., a deliveryman with a dozen drinks from the Boba Guys chain showed up on a motorbike outside with two bags. Another deliveryman followed later with a half dozen more drinks.

At 6:15 p.m., a food delivery driver pulled up at the rear entrance and jumped out with four bags from McDonald’s. Two employees from OpenAI loaded them on carts and wheeled them inside for what looked to be a long night.

Sam Altman is back in the building at OpenAI for the final stretch of negotiations for his potential return as CEO after being unceremoniously fired by the four-member board on Friday. A source close to Altman says he has once again set a 5PM PT deadline to resolve the situation, as he did yesterday — that big show of heart emoji support last night was meant to demonstrate how many people would leave for a new company with him.

One big condition of Altman’s return is that the existing board (who fired him!) has to step down. The existing board has to make some hard decisions about who will replace them, which appears to be the sticking point. Microsoft’s Satya Nadella is reportedly mediating the discussion between Altman, former OpenAI president Greg Brockman, and the four current board members as they attempt to select a new board. We’re also told Microsoft would very much like to wrap this up before the stock market opens tomorrow morning. (Microsoft declined to comment; OpenAI’s communications team isn’t returning calls.)

Today’s 5PM deadline is meant to be a hard deadline, per the source close to Altman. If a deal isn’t reached, things will take “a different path,” we’re told, and extend through tomorrow and perhaps much longer.

Updates to come!