Microsoft hires Sam Altman, former CEO of OpenAI

Last week, the board of directors of OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, announced that it has fired the CEO of the non-profit organization, Sam Altman. According to OpenAI, the board took the decision as it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” That sent shockwaves through the tech industry.

Today, Microsoft, which has not only invested heavily in OpenAI but is also the exclusive cloud partner for OpenAI, has announced that it has hired Sam Altman as well as Greg Brockman, the co-founder of OpenAI. According to the CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, they both will “lead a new advanced AI research team” at the company.

After firing Sam Altman, OpenAI made Mira Murati, the CTO of the company, the interim CEO. Two days later, news broke out that the non-profile organization has replaced her with Emmet Shear, the co-founder of Twitch (as the interim CEO). However, OpenAI hasn’t appointed anyone as the permanent CEO of the company so far.

Microsoft tried to reinstate Sam Altman as OpenAI's CEO

Reportedly, OpenAI didn’t inform Microsoft beforehand that it was going to fire Sam Altman. Once Microsoft got to the news, it reportedly tried to reinstate him. Currently, there’s no solid information about why Microsoft wanted Sam to stay at OpenAI. OpenAI’s employees also showed a public display of support for Sam, urging the board to bring him back. Unfortunately, the negotiations were not fruitful.

A couple of days before OpenAI fired Sam Altman, Microsoft announced Azure Maia 100 AI Accelerator, a chipset that’s made for processing artificial intelligence (AI) and generative AI tasks. According to the company, the Maia 100 AI Accelerator will power servers that run AI workloads, such as those from OpenAI. The company also revealed it is working with OpenAI and Sam to refine and test this chipset.