We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them. And 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.
News article covering the situation: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/20/23968829/microsoft-hires-sam-altman-greg-brockman-employees-openai
Altman’s Microsoft hiring comes just hours after negotiations with OpenAI’s board failed to bring him back as OpenAI CEO. Instead, former Twitch CEO and co-founder Emmett Shear has been named as interim CEO.
Altman had been negotiating to return as OpenAI CEO, but OpenAI’s four-person board refused to step down and let him return.
I don’t think you realize Sam is literally the CEO of this new company, it’s not just some small Microsoft’s department, this is effectively a new company owned by Microsoft just like deepmind has its own CEO but is also technically owned by google.
The GPT-4 Lead has already quit OpenAI to join Sam and Greg, and Greg has experience himself being listed as lead of infrastructure team on the GPT-4 paper, actually Greg Brockman has more significant main contributions on the official GPT-4 paper than Ilya does.