Microsoft has hired former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and chairman Greg Brockman to head a new division focused on advanced artificial intelligence (AI) research, Chief Executive Officer Satya Nadella said on Monday.
“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success,” said Nadella in a social media post on X.
Altman was pushed out by the Open AI Board on November 17, while Brockman quit the company a day later after he was removed from the position of chairman of the board.
OpenAI board said in a blog post, published November 17, that it had lost confidence in Altman’s ability to lead the company as he was not "consistently candid in his communications" with them.
Nadella also welcomed Emmett Shear, the co-founder of Twitch, as the new CEO of OpenAI. “We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them,” Nadella said in a statement.
He also added that Microsoft is committed to its partnership with OpenAI and has confidence in their product roadmap
Shear will take charge from interim CEO and CTO Mira Murati.
Shear’s appointment was announced after the OpenAI board refused to reinstate Altman to his old position.
The board, led by Ilya Sutskever, was reportedly worried about the rapid development of new large language models (LLMs) by OpenAI and wanted to ensure proper safeguards to minimize the potential harms of AI.
According to a report in The Information, the OpenAI board told employees that removing Altman was only way to achieve the company’s mission of “broadly beneficial” artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Microsoft reportedly owns 49% stakes in OpenAI and is believed to have invested close to $10 billion in the AI startup to spur research, development, and commercial adoption of its LLMs.
The big tech firm has integrated several OpenAI’s models into its products and services and is making them available to its enterprise customers through its Azure OpenAI service. The Windows maker has also integrated ChatGPT in Bing search and on Windows 11 as a Copilot.
Founded in 2015 by Silicon Valley luminaries such as Elon Musk and Sam Altman, who also served as its CEO, Open AI has developed several generative AI models that can create human-like responses, poems, codes, images, and artwork from text inputs. Some of its notable products include ChatGPT, DALL-E, and Codex, which can generate natural language, visual art, and computer code, respectively.