This is behind the major scandal at ChatGPT developer company OpenAI

Dispute over direction at the world’s most important start-up: the development company behind chatbot ChatGPT surprisingly gets a new boss. Co-founder and company director Sam Altman left his company OpenAI because the board of directors lost confidence in him.

Why is Altman gone?

Altman was the public face of OpenAI – and, more broadly, of the artificial intelligence boom. OpenAI’s statement on Friday was unusually strongly worded: Altman had not been honest in his communications with the supervisory board.

“The board of directors no longer has confidence in its ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” the report said. There were no further details, and the tech industry in San Francisco and Silicon Valley then began to guess what might have happened.

Renowned technology journalist Kara Swisher wrote that the trigger was disagreements between two camps of OpenAI – namely between the for-profit and non-profit wings of the company.

What was the occasion?

OpenAI was originally founded in 2015 by Altman and Tesla boss Elon Musk, among others, as a non-profit start-up intended to research artificial intelligence. However, over time – and a billion-dollar investment from Microsoft – OpenAI became increasingly a profit-oriented company. Musk, among others, has repeatedly criticized this.

The official communication already contained a reference to such tensions between the lines. It explicitly emphasized that OpenAI was consciously built for one mission: “ensuring that general artificial intelligence benefits all humanity.” We remain committed to this goal.

According to Swisher’s information, the OpenAI developer conference was a trigger for Altman’s expulsionwhich, among other things, offered the opportunity to develop specialized versions of ChatGPT and monetize them.

It all happened too quickly for the nonprofit OpenAI, Swisher wrote on the online platform According to Swisher’s sources, Altman learned of the board’s decision just 30 minutes before the announcement was made public.

What about the departure of the other co-founder?

A few hours after Altman was forced out, another co-founder, Greg Brockman, also resigned. He referred to “today’s news”. Brockman served as chairman of the board until Friday and was expected to leave that post but remain with the company, the statement said.

According to information from Swisher and the equally well-connected industry service ‘The Information’, one of the initiators of the action against Altman was chief scientist Ilya Sutskever.

Who will take over the position of boss?

Technology boss Mira Murati will temporarily take over the top position while the permanent successor is regulated, OpenAI said. Altman was in the spotlight until the end: on Thursday he spoke at the summit of the APEC group of countries in San Francisco.

How does Microsoft respond?

The AI ​​chatbot ChatGPT can formulate sentences at the language level of a human. Its publication about a year ago sparked a hype about artificial intelligence. OpenAI has therefore become a pioneer in the technology. Microsoft made a multibillion-dollar pact with the company to bring its technology into the company’s products. Other tech heavyweights such as Google, Amazon and the Facebook group Meta presented competing software for ChatGPT.

Microsoft emphasized that it will maintain its partnership with OpenAI. At the same time, the software giant made it clear that the AI ​​company cannot simply withdraw from the collaboration: “We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI and have access to everything we need to implement our innovation agenda.”

What is Sam Altman up to?

The pioneering role is lucrative for OpenAI: according to media reports, the sale of employee shares assumed a total valuation of $86 billion. OpenAI thus rose to become one of the most valuable non-listed companies – alongside the video service TikTok and Musk’s space company SpaceX.

Although there was speculation about the reasons for Altman’s expulsion, in a brief statement to X he simply wrote that he would provide information about his plans for the future later.

Altman received praise from former Google boss Eric Schmidt. To him, Altman is a hero who changed our world forever, Schmidt wrote at X. He can’t wait to see what Altman does next – and billions of people will benefit from it.

(dsc/sda/dpa)