Sam Altman’s Microsoft move not final, OpenAI board under pressure

Photo: Sam Altman / X

Sam Altman’s move to Microsoft after being fired from OpenAI is not final yet. He and co-founder Greg Brockman want to return to OpenAI if the board members who ousted him resign, sources tell The Verge. The board is under pressure from the threat of losing almost every OpenAI employee, who supports Altman and Brockman. Altman posted on X that the battle continues. He and the company’s investors are still trying to find a graceful exit for the board, sources say.

Meanwhile, the board announced that Emmett Shear, the co-founder of Twitch, would be CEO, but Altman and Brockman are still negotiating with the board to potentially come back.

After a weekend of negotiations of potentially bringing Altman back to OpenAI, that's when Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that Altman and Brockman were to lead its new advanced AI research team, with Altman as the group's CEO. 

The story is still developing at this time. Microsoft still has a "multibillion dollar investment" in OpenAI, rumoured to be worth US$10 billion. It remains the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, with its cloud services powering all OpenAI workloads across products, research, and API services.

Nadella appeared on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, where he was asked if Altman and 700 OpenAI staffers would join his company. Nadella said only “that is for the OpenAI board and management and employees to choose.” He followed by saying 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.”

He also talked about how there needs to be governance changes in the company. He said on CNBC that “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.” And he reiterated that on Bloomberg saying, Microsoft will “definitely want some governance changes. This idea that changes happen without being in the loop is not good.”

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