OpenAI’s Employees Saved Sam Altman & Secured His Return Says Report

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As the dust settles around the saga surrounding board and executive conflicts at the artificial intelligence startup OpenAI, more details about behind-the-scenes events are surfacing. OpenAI - the firm behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT - took the media by surprise in November after a short blog post announced the ouster of its chief, Sam Altman. While this alone was sufficient to generate a plethora of stories, Altman, who initially agreed to step down, waged a comeback that saw him negotiate his return to the firm amidst widespread support by employees, according to fresh details shared in a report by the New York Times.

According to the report, Mr. Altman's stunning return to OpenAI came after he marshaled support for his role at the company at his house in San Francisco. The details come courtesy of the Times's interviews with dozens of people. While matters came to a head in November, trouble at OpenAI started brewing two months back in September due to a conflict between Mr. Altman and the former OpenAI board over filling up missing seats.

Altman's decision to create a for-profit OpenAI subsidiary and his decision to elevate an OpenAI researcher to the same corporate rank as the firm's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, were some factors that continued to create mistrust between stakeholders within the firm. While OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a counter to Alphabet subsidiary Google's DeepMind A.I. division, Altman took the top role at the company four years later in 2019.

Four years later, the board, wary about Mr. Altman using his professional network to reverse a potential