Three senior OpenAI researchers Jakub Pachocki, Aleksander Madry and Szymon Sidor told associates they have resigned, news agency Reuters reported. The board of the company behind ChatGPT on Friday fired OpenAI CEO Sam Altman – to many, the human face of generative AI – sending shock waves across the tech industry.
OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati will serve as interim CEO, the company said, adding that it will conduct a formal search for a permanent CEO.
Pachocki, who served as the company’s director of research, Madry, the head of a team assessing potential risks from AI, and Sidor, a researcher at OpenAI for seven years, have reportedly resigned from their positions.
The announcement also said another OpenAI co-founder and top executive, Greg Brockman, the board’s chairman, would step down from that role but remain at the company, where he serves as president. But later on X, formerly Twitter, Brockman posted a message he sent to OpenAI employees in which he wrote, “based on today’s news, i quit.”
In another X post on Friday night, Brockman said Altman was asked to join a video meeting at noon on Friday with the company’s board members, minus Brockman, during which OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever informed Altman he was being fired.
“Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” Brockman wrote, adding that he was informed of his removal from the board in a separate call with Sutskever a short time later.
OpenAI declined to answer questions on what Altman’s alleged lack of candour was about. The statement said his behaviour was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.
Altman posted Friday on X: “i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later.”
Altman helped start OpenAI as a non-profit research laboratory in 2015. But it was ChatGPT’s explosion into thenpublic consciousness that thrust Altman into the spotlight as a face of generative AI — technology that can produce novel imagery, passages of text and other media. On a world tour this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in London.
He’s sat with multiple heads of state to discuss AI’s potential and perils. Just Thursday, he took part in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based.
He predicted AI will prove to be “the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we’ve had so far.” He also acknowledged the need for guardrails, calling attention to the existential dangers future AI could pose.
The company said its board consists of OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, and three non-employees: Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
OpenAI’s key business partner, Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars into the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems, said that the transition won’t affect its relationship.
OpenAI started out as a nonprofit when it launched with financial backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated aims were to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shifted nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT large language model for mimicking human writing. Around the same time, Musk, who had co-chaired its board with Altman, resigned from the board in a move that OpenAI said would eliminate a “potential future conflict for Elon” due to Tesla’s work on building self-driving systems.
While OpenAI’s board has preserved its nonprofit governance structure, the startup it oversees has increasingly sought to capitalize on its technology by tailoring its popular chatbot to business customers.
At its first developer conference last week, Altman was the main speaker showcasing a vision for a future of AI agents that could help people with a variety of tasks. Days later, he announced the company would have to pause new subscriptions to its premium version of ChatGPT because it had exceeded capacity.
