According to news on December 6, three weeks ago, the board of directors of the American artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI briefly dismissed the company’s CEO Sam Altman without specific reasons. Reid Hoffman, former director of OpenAI and co-founder of LinkedIn, said that he is still confused about the reasons for ousting Altman.
"When I read the announcement, I was like, 'What the hell is going on?'" Hoffman said at the LiveWired conference in San Francisco hosted by Wired magazine on Tuesday local time. "I still feel like I haven't quite figured it out yet."
Altman was eventually rehired as CEO amid a push from investors and threats of mass resignations. The OpenAI board of directors is currently undergoing a reshuffle, and some directors have left, but the relevant parties have basically remained silent on the reasons for this farce.
Altman has reportedly been raising funds for an artificial intelligence chip startup. There are also reports that OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever believes that Altman does not pay enough attention to the potential risks of the company's advancement of artificial intelligence technology. Some media revealed that the board of directors learned from employees about a technological breakthrough that may threaten human survival. Other reports detailed Altman's many disagreements with director Helen Toner, who later left the company.
An OpenAI executive told employees that the board was not firing Altman for "malfeasance or anything related to the company's financial, business, security or privacy practices."
But this fog has cast an atmosphere of uncertainty over OpenAI, and competitors have taken advantage of this period of uncertainty to benefit themselves. Last week, Adam Selipsky, the head of Amazon's cloud computing division that competes with Microsoft Azure, publicly stated that this incident shows why people don't want cloud computing providers to be tied to an artificial intelligence model provider.
Huffman was one of the original funders of OpenAI Labs. After Microsoft acquired LinkedIn for $26 billion in 2017, Hoffman joined Microsoft's board of directors. Hoffman resigned from the OpenAI board of directors in March this year. He said he had not spoken with members of the OpenAI board of directors, but had communicated with Altman.
After Altman was dismissed, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella proposed to hire Altman, OpenAI President Greg Brockman (Greg Brockman) and other colleagues to form a new advanced artificial intelligence research group. But Ultraman soon returned to OpenAI.
"I do think everyone will be better off having Altman as CEO again," Hoffman said. "He's very capable in this regard."
Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure for OpenAI and embeds OpenAI services into Windows and Office software. Hoffman said the partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft will become a business school curriculum.
Nadella's attitude toward the OpenAI drama, Hoffman said, may be, "If it ain't broke, don't touch it."
"Nadella is a leader of great integrity and sincerity," Hoffman also said. "I think if that was the only way to go, he would hire everyone at OpenAI and move on."