Sam Altman may still end up in OpenAI, suggests Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

tech.hindustantimes.com:

The Sam Altman-OpenAI-Microsoft saga is turning out to be one of the most dramatic ones to come out of the tech world. Just when it seemed that the entire situation was over with Altman and Greg Brockman joining Microsoft, Satya Nadella threw yet another curve ball. Appearing in interviews with CNBC and Bloomberg TV a few hours earlier, the Microsoft CEO hinted at the possibility that Altman may return to OpenAI, the home he was ousted from. The statements by Nadella only add fuel to the fire earlier started with Ilya Sutskever's post on X showing regret for the incident and the open letter by OpenAI staff threatening to mass resign if Altman was not reinstated.

During an interview with CNBC, Nadella said, “Obviously, we want Sam and Greg to have a fantastic home if they're not going to be in OpenAI”. When asked whether Altman and 700 OpenAI employees would join him at Microsoft, he added, “That's for, you know, [the] OpenAI board and management and the employees to choose … [Microsoft] chose to explicitly partner with OpenAI [and] obviously that depends on the people at OpenAI staying there or coming to Microsoft, so I'm open to both options”.

Nadella also went over the topic of whether Microsoft is considering taking a seat on the OpenAI board. In the CNBC interview, he said, “It's clear something has to change around the governance. We will have a good dialogue with their board on that, and walk through that as that evolves”. Along the same lines, he said, as per The Verge report, in the Bloomberg TV interview that Microsoft will “definitely want some governance changes. This idea that changes happen without being in the loop is not good.”

Nadella's uncertainty on whether Altman will join the team or not is something