Well, that was quite the weekend.
In case you’ve managed to avoid the news for the last few days, OpenAI cofounders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman now work for Microsoft and OpenAI is being (temporarily?) led by former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear following the blink-and-you-missed-it interim-CEO-ship of chief technology officer Mira Murati, who took the reins when cofounder Ilya Sutskever and the OpenAI board booted out Altman for being “not consistently candid” with them, only to push for Altman’s return, which didn’t happen.
What actually triggered this omnishambles? That’s not entirely clear right now, but it may have something to do with Altman’s secretive plan to launch an AI-chip venture and/or disagreement over the safety implications of the pace of AI development, with Altman in the “faster” camp and Sutskever in the “slower and safer” camp. FWIW, Shear tweeted: “The board did *not* remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models.”
However, OpenAI’s future suddenly looks very cloudy. Both Shear and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella insist the companies’ partnership remains solid, but Microsoft just scored a new “advanced AI research team” with Altman as the new group’s CEO. Sutskever tweeted this morning that he deeply regrets participating in the board's ouster of Altman, and he and Murati—and most of their colleagues—have now signed an open letter calling on the board to resign and reinstate Altman and Brockman, or face a mass defection of employees to that new Microsoft team.
Whatever happens, Microsoft is clearly the power player here, and if you have time to only read one article on this debacle, make sure it's the piece Jeremy Kahn wrote on Microsoft’s massive leverage over OpenAI and the resulting tension with OpenAI’s weird corporate governance structure.
All this drama has, for once, relegated Elon Musk—OpenAI's other cofounder, and these days one of its biggest critics—to the sidelines of the action. But that’s not usually the situation and, as it happens, we’ve just published a special digital issue of Fortune, with an exclusive focus on the poly-CEO and his various pursuits.
In that issue, I explain the (still human) thinking behind xAI, Kylie Robison goes in-depth on the transition from Twitter to X, Jessica Mathews writes about Boring Co.’s struggle to realize Musk’s tunnel vision, Christiaan Hetzner covers the slow progress of Tesla’s solar business, Jeff John Roberts dives into Musk’s legal travails—and Luisa Beltran explores the exec teams at Tesla, SpaceX, X and xAI, while also (alongside Nicolas Rapp) giving us a map of Musk’s global business interests.
Phew! More news below.
David Meyer
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