In less than 72 hours, the Artificial Intelligence industry has undergone a true revolution. On Friday, November 17, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, was fired in an unexpected move, after the good performance of the company’s main product, ChatGPT, which accounts for more than 60% of visits to AI tools worldwide.
However, OpenAI’s board of directors noted “that it no longer had confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
Despite everything, after the dismissal, the company re-established relations over the weekend with Altman so that he could once again occupy the position of CEO. However, the 38-year-old manager did not take long to find another job destination.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, has announced on X (formerly Twitter) that both Sam Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman have been hired by Microsoft to lead the company’s new advanced AI research team.
Sam Altman confirmed the information by reposting Nadella’s information on his Twitter account, while Brockman confirmed that they would not be the only OpenAI workers leaving for Microsoft. Also leaving with them are Jakub Pachocki, research director at OpenAI, and Szymon Sidor and Aleksander Madry, among other talents who held leadership positions at OpenAI.
More resignations expected at OpenAI – up to 500 employees of the company have already expressed their intention to leave and join Microsoft to be part of the team led by Sam Altam at OpenAI.
We will be very attentive to the news that occurs in the coming hours and we will update this information. Meanwhile, let’s review the career of one of the key names in the Artificial Intelligence industry, Sam Altman.
Who is Sam Altman: career and biography
Samuel Harris Altman was born in 1985 in Chicago (United States) although he currently resides in San Francisco. He had his first computer when he was 8 years old and studied computer science at Stanford University. At the age of 19, in 2005, he founded his first company, Loopt, a social geolocation app that he sold for $43 million in 2012.
A year earlier he began working at Y Combinator, a technology accelerator company of which he became president in 2014. Although he was president of Reddit for a few days, he focused his work on the development of projects at Y Combinator, a firm that financed and participated in the launch of important technology companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase or Dropbox.
Y Combinator was also responsible for providing the majority of the capital to found and develop OpenAI in 2015. The goal was to create a company that promoted Artificial Intelligence for the benefit of humanity.
Samuel Altman has dedicated all his efforts since 2019 to the consolidation of OpenAI within the field of Artificial Intelligence, its main development being the creation of ChatGPT, the most used AI tool in the world today. Samuel Altman was CEO of OpenAI until November 17, 2023, a couple of days before being hired by Microsoft to lead its Artificial Intelligence area.
