Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Linda Yaccarino defends X following Elon Musk's controversial tweet, a new report outlines how women are vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and the OpenAI turmoil briefly swirled around its 34-year-old CTO Mira Murati. Have a great Monday!
- OpenAI saga. Anyone read the news this weekend? It's been, you could say, an eventful few days. Dominating the business news cycle is the ouster of CEO Sam Altman from OpenAI, the influential startup behind ChatGPT and the mainstreaming of generative AI.
On Friday, the company's board fired Altman, saying he was "not consistently candid" in his communications with the board. The shocking move was spearheaded by OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever; he reportedly disagreed with Altman over the issue of AI safety—including AI extremists' worries that super-intelligence could overtake humanity—and how quickly to bring OpenAI products to the public.
With Altman's ouster, a longtime OpenAI exec was tapped to step in as interim CEO: Mira Murati. Murati joined the startup in 2018 after working on AI at Tesla and has served as OpenAI's chief technology officer. The 34-year-old, originally from Albania, is responsible for ChatGPT and DALL-E, the system that creates art from text.
Over the weekend, OpenAI's investors negotiated with the board to reinstate Altman and president Greg Brockman, who left with Altman. (OpenAI's origins as a nonprofit gave it an unusual board structure, which means many of its biggest investors—like Microsoft—are not represented on the company's board and were not involved in the decision to terminate Altman.)
At one point, Bloomberg reported that Murati herself was negotiating to bring back Altman and Brockman in a different capacity, but that effort fell through. Late Sunday, Sutskever told OpenAI staff that Altman would not be returning and that Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear would serve as OpenAI's new interim CEO, seemingly replacing Murati.
In another twist, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said before markets opened early Monday that the tech giant had hired Altman and Brockman “to lead a new advanced AI research team." When Brockman tweeted out the "initial leadership" of the new Microsoft team, Murati wasn't included.
Regardless of where Murati ultimately ends up—the situation is very much in flux—she's likely to remain a critically important leader to know in the generative AI community. She was among the many OpenAI employees who tweeted "OpenAI is nothing without its people" after the latest news broke and reportedly among the three-quarters of employees who signed a letter calling for the board to resign and threatening to leave for Microsoft if they don't.
Murati was on the cover of Fortune just last month. In an interview, she shared with Fortune's Kylie Robison and Michal Lev-Ram her views on competition in the field, governmental regulation, and, yes, the doomsday question.
"I think they're both possibilities," she said of the chance that AI leads to either a utopia or an existential threat. "There is also the existential threat that, you know, it’s basically the end of civilization. I think there is [only] a small chance of that happening, but there is some small chance, and so it is very much worth thinking about."
She expressed concerns that competition between major tech companies building this technology could lead to a "race to the bottom on safety." But, overall, she called herself "optimistic" that the technology will have positive outcomes for society.
Follow Fortune's coverage of the ongoing story here and re-read Fortune's October interview with Murati here.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
The Broadsheet is Fortune's newsletter for and about the world's most powerful women. Today's edition was curated by Joseph Abrams. Subscribe here.
