The Scrambling Attempts of OpenAI Board

After OpenAI’s board fired Sam Altman on Friday (17th Nov), the board members had some tasks at hand: communicating their reasoning and keeping the company stable. Instead, they were scrambling to find a replacement for the just-announced Interim CEO Mira Murati (Mira has shown support for Sam since then).

What’s going on here?

OpenAI board was trying its luck everywhere after firing Sam Altman.

What does that mean?

As per reports, The Open AI board went to former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman and the co-founder and CEO of Scale AI, Alex Wang. Both of them declined the offer.

Another major (but expected) attempt from the board was contacting Anthropic for a merger. Anthropic was started by ex-OpenAI employees Dario and Daniela Amodei with their concerns about OpenAI’s approach to safety.

Finally, Emmett Shear (co-founder of Twitch) accepted the role as Interim CEO, mentioning “The board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that” in his statement on Sunday night. Emmett hasn’t made any public statements yet.

Why should I care?

The Board has yet to give any clear reason about what they meant by “Sam was consistently not candid in his conversations.” With safety disagreement rejected as the reason, the speculations about conflict with Poe, Adam D’Angleo’s chatbot company are picking up heat. Again friendly reminder, these are just speculations.

In the meanwhile, 743 out of ~770 employees of OpenAI have signed the letter asking for the board’s resignation. OpenAI investors (led by Thrive Capital) are still hopeful that the company can be saved from imploding if the board resigns.

You can catch more updates about What’s going on with Open AI? on our regularly updated post.