The OpenAI board is in discussions with Sam Altman to return as the CEO of the company, The Verge reported Saturday (November 18), citing multiple people familiar with the matter.

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A Forbes report reveals that venture capital firms holding positions in OpenAI’s for-profit entity have discussed working with Microsoft and senior employees at the company to bring back Altman, even as he has signaled to some that he intends to launch a new startup.

At least one firm, Sequoia, was independently in contact with Microsoft to encourage it to work to restore Altman and Brockman, according to a source with knowledge of the matter. The firm would support Altman whichever option he chose, Forbes report added.

This comes after Open AI announced the dismissal of its CEO and co-founder Sam Altman on Friday and appointed Mira Murati as the interim chief executive officer of the company. "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," the artificial intelligence company said in a statement.

In the year since Altman catapulted ChatGPT to global fame, he has become Silicon Valley’s sought-after voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence, and his sudden and mostly unexplained exit brought uncertainty to the industry’s future.

Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, will take over as interim CEO effective immediately, the company said, while it searches for a permanent replacement.

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 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 candor was about. The statement said his behavior 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.”

In another post on X early Saturday morning, he called what happened a "weird experience" and thanked his followers for the “outpouring of love.” “it has been sorta like reading your own eulogy while you’re still alive,” Altman wrote.

Altman helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit research laboratory in 2015. But it was ChatGPT’s explosion into the public 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.

Some computer scientists have criticized that focus on far-off risks as distracting from the real-world limitations and harms of current AI products. The US Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into whether OpenAI violated consumer protection laws by scraping public data and publishing false information through its chatbot.

First Published:Nov 19, 2023 8:47 AM IST