A chaotic corporate mess worthy of a Hollywood movie

Last week’s events at OpenAI unfolded like a dramatic script. It was fast and chaotic, like a trailer for a Hollywood blockbuster. If you’re not up to speed, let me give you a refresher.

Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI) was unexpectedly fired by the board of directors during a Google meeting last Friday, while CTO Mira Murati served as interim CEO for what seemed like five minutes, as the board hastily appointed Emmett Shear, director Twitch executive, as interim CEO. Meanwhile, negotiations for Altman’s return were rumored on Sunday.

As the chaos unfolded, several senior executives resigned, including Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, while more than 700 of the company’s 770 employees signed a letter threatening to leave.

By Monday, OpenAI backer Microsoft had offered to hire Altman and Brockman “to lead a new advanced AI research team.” By late Tuesday and early Wednesday morning, OpenAI had fired members of its board and recalled Sam Altman to resume his job. After the dust settled, the entire drama left us with many unanswered questions: What prompted the board to suddenly fire Altman? Why did this sequence of events develop?

There have been many speculations, the most interesting of which suggests that the entire event was engineered by a time traveler who came to change OpenAI’s involvement in a future AI takeover. I’m not a conspiracy theorist, but it stands to reason that the important decision the company could have made in those five days couldn’t have happened and was enough to avoid the future event – don’t blame me, blame them finisher film.

Wishing you a drama-free weekend,

– Emmanuel