Turmoil at OpenAI: what’s next for the creator of ChatGPT?

OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.

Nakasone, who was nominated to lead the NSA by former President Donald Trump, directed the agency from 2018 until February of this year. Before Nakasone left the NSA, he wrote an op-ed supporting the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the surveillance program that was ultimately reauthorized by Congress in April.

Elon Musk has dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing the company of a breach of contract and allegedly abandoning its mission of creating AI technology to benefit humanity. As reported earlier by CNBC, the case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning Musk can file it again.

Musk’s decision to withdraw the lawsuit, filed in a California state court in February (case number CGC24612746), comes just one day before a scheduled hearing where the judge would’ve reviewed OpenAI’s request to dismiss the case. It’s also one day after Musk said he would ban Apple devices at his companies if the company integrates OpenAI’s technology into the iPhone and Mac “at the OS level,” among other bizarre threats.

On November 17th, 2023, OpenAI’s board shocked everyone by suddenly ousting co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.

He had been overseeing one of the fastest-growing app launches in history with ChatGPT, so what happened? Former board member Helen Toner is filling in blank spaces in an interview on The TED AI Show podcast, providing her perspective on the events that caused board members to stop trusting Altman as well as how he eventually returned.

OpenAI is forming a new safety team, and it’s led by CEO Sam Altman, along with board members Adam D’Angelo and Nicole Seligman. The committee will make recommendations on “critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations” — a concern several key AI researchers shared when leaving the company this month.

For its first task, the new team will “evaluate and further develop OpenAI’s processes and safeguards.” It will then present its findings to OpenAI’s board, which all three of the safety team’s leaders have a seat on. The board will then decide how to implement the safety team’s recommendations.

Jan Leike, a key OpenAI researcher who resigned earlier this week following the departure of co-founder Ilya Sutskever, posted on X Friday morning that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” at the company.

Leike’s statements came after Wired reported that OpenAI had disbanded the team dedicated to addressing long-term AI risks (called the “Superalignment team”) altogether. Leike had been running the Superalignment team, which formed last July to “solve the core technical challenges” in implementing safety protocols as OpenAI developed AI that can reason like a human.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist who helped lead the infamous failed coup against Sam Altman and then later changed his mind, is officially leaving the company.

Both Altman and Sutskever have posts announcing the news:

An independent investigation commissioned by OpenAI’s nonprofit board has found that CEO Sam Altman’s conduct “did not mandate removal.” After surviving an attempted boardroom coup in November, he will now rejoin the board.

In a press release, board chair Bret Taylor said the law firm WilmerHale interviewed board members, employees, and reviewed “more than 30,000 documents” to reach the conclusion that Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman “are the right leaders for OpenAI.”

OpenAI has responded to Elon Musk’s lawsuit by saying that he at one point wanted “absolute control” of the company by merging it with Tesla.

In a blog post published on Tuesday, OpenAI said it will move to dismiss “all of Elon’s claims” and offered its own counter-narrative to his account of the company abandoning its original mission as a nonprofit.

Elon Musk sued OpenAI today, alleging a wide range of incendiary things, including that GPT-4 is actually an artificial general intelligence. It’s a fun complaint to read; it fundamentally accuses OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, of pretending to run a nonprofit designed to benefit humanity while actually running a regular ol’ tech company and trying to make a lot of money. That’s a pretty good criticism of the entire OpenAI situation, actually! Someone with some intellectual honesty and a competent lawyer should run at that sometime.

Sadly, Musk is not that person, and his lawyers have figured out that letting the world’s richest man rack up billable hours filing nonsensical lawsuits is more lucrative than fitting the “facts” to the “law,” or whatever it is regular lawyers do.

Elon Musk is suing OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over claims that the pursuit of profit has led the company to abandon its founding mission to develop artificial intelligence technology that will benefit humanity. In a lawsuit filed with a San Francisco court on Thursday, Musk alleges that OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft has transformed the organization “into a closed-source de facto subsidiary” of Microsoft that’s focused on maximizing profits.

According to the lawsuit, such actions constitute a breach of the founding agreement between Musk — who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 but no longer retains a stake in the company — Altman, and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who committed to making the project a nonprofit and its technology open source. These violations include keeping the design of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model a “complete secret,” with the suit claiming this decision was “primarily driven by commercial considerations, not safety” and that the GPT-4 model is now “a de facto Microsoft proprietary algorithm.” OpenAI declined to comment on the suit.

We still don’t know the whole story around the conflict between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the company’s board, but more and more is leaking out. A new report, from The New Yorker, alleges that OpenAI’s old board deliberately excluded Microsoft after initially voting to expel Sam Altman as CEO, and they actually believed the company would back them.

In the sprawling story, New Yorker reported Microsoft executives were blindsided by the decision to oust Sam Altman, possibly to prevent Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella from warning Altman what was about to happen. 

OpenAI’s GPT store will be delayed until next year, the company said in an email to people who signed up for its GPT Builder. 

In the email, OpenAI said that “unexpected things have been keeping us busy,” pushing back the GPT store’s rollout. The company said it had planned to release the store in December, which itself is slightly later than originally promised; at its developer conference in November, OpenAI said the store would launch later that month.

When OpenAI’s board asked Sam Altman to return a day after they fired him, he initially felt defiant, hurt, and angry.

“It took me a few minutes to snap out of it and get over the ego and emotions to then be like, ‘Yeah, of course I want to do that,’” he told me by phone on Wednesday. “Obviously, I really loved the company and had poured my life force into this for the last four and a half years full time, but really longer than that with most of my time. And we’re making such great progress on the mission that I care so much about, the mission of safe and beneficial AGI.”

Sam Altman is officially OpenAI’s CEO again.

Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it’s done. Microsoft is getting a non-voting observer seat on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI as well, the company announced on Wednesday.