OpenAI announced on Monday that it will bring back its co-founder Sam Altman as CEO and overhaul its board of directors, ending a week-long crisis that rocked the AI world.
The move comes after nearly all of its employees threatened to resign over Altman’s abrupt dismissal on Friday.
Altman, who was fired over disputes with the board on the speed and direction of AI development and commercialization, had been in talks with the company to return, but the negotiations stalled on Sunday over the demand for some board members to step down.
According to sources, Altman and his allies wanted to replace the existing board with new directors, including Larry Summers, the former U.S. Treasury Secretary, and Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of Salesforce and director of Twitter.
The company said in a post on X that it has reached an agreement with Altman and the initial board will be chaired by Taylor, while Summers and Adam D’Angelo, the co-founder and CEO of Quora, will join as new directors.
OpenAI added that it is working “to figure out the details” of the transition and the future governance structure.
The announcement was met with jubilation on X by some of the key players in the saga, such as Greg Brockman, the former president of OpenAI, who said he is also returning to the company, and Mira Murati, the chief technology officer.
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They congratulated Altman and expressed their excitement for the next chapter of OpenAI.
OpenAI, founded in 2015 by a group of prominent tech entrepreneurs and researchers, is one of the leading AI research organizations in the world, with a mission to ensure that artificial intelligence is aligned with human values and can benefit all of humanity.
The company has made breakthroughs in fields such as natural language processing, computer vision, and reinforcement learning and has developed several popular AI systems, such as GPT-3, DALL-E, and Codex.