Those Who Got Fired for Sam Altman to Return as OpenAI’s CEO

On Wednesday, the 22nd of November, at 6:01 AM (GMT), OpenAI announced on Twitter that ousted CEO and co-founder Sam Altman would return to the company as CEO.

The tweet read: “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return… We are collaborating to figure out the details.”

However, the individuals responsible for firing the superstar CEO paid for it by losing their seats on the board of directors. Only Adam D’Angelo will retain his board seat.

The others, Ilya Sutskever, Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley, who were involved in the Altman coup, have been replaced by an interim board consisting of Bret Taylor and Larry Summers.

The ousted board members’ narrative of why Sam Altman was fired seemed not to have gained the support of public opinion.

Sam has his colleagues to thank, as they contributed to his reinstatement as OpenAI’s CEO. After Sam was fired, the majority of the employees who worked under him threatened to leave unless he’s reappointed and the former board resigns, which has happened.

In a tweet following OpenAI’s announcement, Sam recognised the support of Microsoft, which reportedly owns 49% of OpenAI through a $13 billion investment in the artificial intelligence startup.

The reinstated CEO said, “with the new board and Satya’s support, I’m looking forward to returning to OpenAI.”

Former President of OpenAI, Greg Brockman, who had earlier promoted the release of a new ChatGPT feature, ChatGPT Voice, just before he resigned in support of Sam Altman, is looking to get back into coding at OpenAI.

Now that things are falling back into place for the organisation that made global news headlines all week, we look forward to seeing what more they can contribute to the development of artificial intelligence.