Turmoil at OpenAI: what’s next for the creator of ChatGPT?

OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit by saying that he at one point wanted “absolute control” of the company by merging it with Tesla.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, OpenAI said it will move to dismiss “all of Elon’s claims” and offered its own counter-narrative to his account of the company abandoning its original mission as a nonprofit.

Elon Musk sued OpenAI today, alleging a wide range of incendiary things, including that GPT-4 is actually an artificial general intelligence. It’s a fun complaint to read; it fundamentally accuses OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of pretending to run a nonprofit designed to benefit humanity while actually running a regular ol’ tech company and trying to make a lot of money. That’s a pretty good criticism of the entire OpenAI situation, actually! Someone with some intellectual honesty and a competent lawyer should run at that sometime.

Sadly, Musk is not that person, and his lawyers have figured out that letting the world’s richest man rack up billable hours filing nonsensical lawsuits is more lucrative than fitting the “facts” to the “law,” or whatever it is regular lawyers do.

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over claims that the pursuit of profit has led the company to abandon its founding mission to develop artificial intelligence technology that will benefit humanity. In a lawsuit filed with a San Francisco court on Thursday, Musk alleges that OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft has transformed the organization “into a closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft that’s focused on maximizing profits.

According to the lawsuit, such actions constitute a breach of the founding agreement between Musk — who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but no longer retains a stake in the company — Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who committed to making the project a nonprofit and its technology open source. These violations include keeping the design of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model a “complete secret,” with the suit claiming this decision was “primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety” and that the GPT-4 model is now “a de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm.” OpenAI declined to comment on the suit.

We still don’t know the whole story around the conflict between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the company’s board, but more and more is leaking out. A new report, from The New Yorker, alleges that OpenAI’s old board deliberately excluded Microsoft after initially voting to expel Sam Altman as CEO, and they actually believed the company would back them.

In the sprawling story, New Yorker reported Microsoft executives were blindsided by the decision to oust Sam Altman, possibly to prevent Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella from warning Altman what was about to happen. 

OpenAI’s GPT store will be delayed until next year, the company said in an email to people who signed up for its GPT Builder. 

In the email, OpenAI said that “unexpected things have been keeping us busy,” pushing back the GPT store’s rollout. The company said it had planned to release the store in December, which itself is slightly later than originally promised; at its developer conference in November, OpenAI said the store would launch later that month.

When OpenAI’s board asked Sam Altman to return a day after they fired him, he initially felt defiant, hurt, and angry.

“It took me a few minutes to snap out of it and get over the ego and emotions to then be like, ‘Yeah, of course I want to do that,’” he told me by phone on Wednesday. “Obviously, I really loved the company and had poured my life force into this for the last four and a half years full time, but really longer than that with most of my time. And we’re making such great progress on the mission that I care so much about, the mission of safe and beneficial AGI.”

Sam Altman is officially OpenAI’s CEO again.

Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it’s done. Microsoft is getting a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI as well, the company announced on Wednesday.

Earlier this year, I ran into Adam D’Angelo at an AI conference in San Francisco’s “Cerebral Valley” neighborhood. 

He was there to talk about Poe, the AI bot platform that is his pet project as the CEO of Quora. But I was more interested in his role as a board member of OpenAI, which had just lost two other directors in a matter of a few weeks: Reid Hoffman and Shivon Zilis. Was the board actively looking to fill their spots? I cornered D’Angelo in the halls of the conference venue to ask. He said yes and declined to elaborate. 

In the early hours of Wednesday morning, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman is returning as CEO, following a shock firing on Friday. Over the weekend, it looked like Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman might end up at Microsoft, leading a new AI research lab. But after days of negotiation, that’s no longer the case and OpenAI has appointed a new board of directors and brought back Altman as CEO of the company.

After a weekend of chaotic scenes, including hundreds of OpenAI employees threatening to quit and join Microsoft, things seem to be settling down. Microsoft CTO and EVP of AI Kevin Scott has now addressed Microsoft employees about the OpenAI turmoil. It’s the first company-wide communication to Microsoft employees about the situation, beyond CEO Satya Nadella’s announcement of Altman’s hiring not hiring on Sunday and the initial reaction to the news on Friday.

Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI, overcoming an attempted boardroom coup that sent the company into chaos over the past several days. Former president Greg Brockman, who quit in protest of Altman’s firing, will return as well.

The company said in a statement late Tuesday that it has an “agreement in principle” for Altman to return alongside a new board composed of Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo. D’Angelo is a holdover from the previous board that initially fired Altman on Friday. He remains on this new board to give the previous board some representation, we’re told.

ChatGPT’s voice feature is now available to all users for free. In a post on X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI announced users can now tap the headphones icon to use their voice to talk with ChatGPT in the mobile app, as well as get an audible response.

OpenAI first rolled out the ability to prompt ChatGPT with your voice and images in September, but it only made the feature available to paying users.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced late last night that former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman were both joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team, an announcement that sent Microsoft’s stock price soaring. Now, less than 24 hours later, following The Verge reporting that Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO, Nadella doesn’t seem so sure.

“[We’re] committed to OpenAI and Sam, irrespective of what configuration,” said Nadella in an interview with CNBC’s Jon Fortt, adding that Microsoft “chose to explicitly partner with OpenAI [and] obviously that depends on the people at OpenAI staying there or coming to Microsoft, so I’m open to both options.” Nadella added that “obviously we want Sam and Greg to have a fantastic home if they’re not going to be [at] OpenAI, with all the colleagues at Microsoft, but I’m exactly where I was on Friday morning.”