Original Title: "Exclusive: Farce Ends, Sam Altman Belongs to Microsoft"

Original Source: Forbes China

After experiencing about 72 hours of drama, OpenAI's interim CEO, Mira Murati, announced three hours ago that the company plans to rehire Sam Altman and Greg Brockman. However, this seems to have caused significant disagreement with the current OpenAI board's wishes. Earlier on Sunday, three sources told Forbes that the OpenAI board had chosen former Twitch CEO, Emmett Shear, to serve as interim CEO. This also means that Mira Murati has ultimately chosen to stand on the opposite side of the board. And just 10 minutes ago, OpenAI founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman finally announced their ultimate destination - Microsoft.

Emmett Shear, the new CEO of OpenAI, co-founded Twitch with others in 2011 and sold the streaming video service company to Amazon for $970 million in 2014. He served as the company's CEO until March of this year. Since April, he has been a part-time partner at Y Combinator, a startup accelerator led by Altman. Shear has always been a frank conservative member in the "security" discussion about artificial intelligence. In an interview earlier this year, he said that the survival risk of artificial intelligence would "scare the shit out of people," and he also talked about the security issues of artificial intelligence on X (formerly Twitter), believing that it was like trying to manipulate "a creation of an alien god."

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted 5 minutes ago: "We will continue to commit to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, all the innovative capabilities we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and our continued support for our customers and partners. We look forward to connecting with Emmett Shear and OpenAI's new leadership team and working with them. We are thrilled to announce that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will join Microsoft with colleagues to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to quickly providing them with the resources they need to ensure their success."

Previously, in addition to Mira Murati's final efforts to bring back Sam Altman, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been personally assisting OpenAI management in discussing Altman's return. Earlier this year, Microsoft invested over 10 billion dollars in OpenAI. Microsoft executives were caught off guard by the news of Altman's return and only received the news from OpenAI 5 to 10 minutes before it was announced.

One insider said that if Altman cannot return to OpenAI, Microsoft will consider investing in his new company. And if the ousted CEO Sam Altman returns to the AI technology development company, Microsoft will also strive to have a seat on the OpenAI board of directors.

However, the return of Altman and the establishment of Microsoft's voice in OpenAI still seem unlikely. To a large extent, Microsoft's or Murali's dialogue with the current board of directors is almost like talking to a brick wall, because the board members of this company hardly represent the interests of shareholders, and commercialization is not the most important thing for them.

Furthermore, Sam Altman seems to be increasingly lacking motivation to serve as the CEO of OpenAI. Just 8 hours before the publication of this article, Sam Altman posted a photo on the social application X (formerly Twitter) with the OpenAI 04 visitor badge, and wrote: "This is my first and last time carrying this thing." Subsequently, a more colloquial interpretation of the ambiguous tweet is that Altman has had a falling out with the current board of directors and will not return to the company.

Open AI 董事会更像是一个宗教组织

The Open AI board of directors is more like a religious organization.Last Friday (November 17th), the board of directors of OpenAI, a regulatory artificial intelligence company's non-profit organization, fired CEO Sam Altman and removed President Greg Brockman from the board, shocking the tech industry. Several hours later, Brockman announced his resignation.

Given the unusual structure of OpenAI, this move is even more surprising: according to OpenAI's own description of its corporate structure, the directors do not hold equity in OpenAI nor do they receive any other compensation; Altman himself, who previously served as president of Y Combinator, only indirectly holds shares through Y Combinator's "small" investment.

According to OpenAI's corporate governance information, the directors' primary fiduciary duty is not to maintain shareholder value, but to fulfill the company's mission of creating a safe general artificial intelligence (AGI) that "benefits humanity." The company stated that profit is secondary to this mission. The Wayback Machine's website archive version shows that earlier this year, Reid Hoffman, Shivon Zilis, and Will Hurd successively resigned from the company's board of directors. Subsequently, OpenAI first began publishing the list of board members on its website in July of this year.

A venture capitalist specializing in artificial intelligence pointed out that after Hoffman's departure, the board of directors of OpenAI's non-profit organization lacks many traditional governance methods. They said, "These people are not the business or operational leaders you would want to manage the world's most important non-publicly traded company."

The decision of the board members does not have to bear any responsibility for the company's unfavorable development, only to ensure that they have a sufficient "correct" understanding of technology towards goodness.

Technology for Good Elderly Association

Adam D'Angelo, CEO of the Q&A website Quora, joined the board of OpenAI in April 2018. At the time, he wrote, "I still believe that work on general artificial intelligence (considering safety) is important but underappreciated." In an interview with Forbes in January of this year, D'Angelo believed that one of OpenAI's advantages is its business structure that sets a limit on investment profits and its non-profit control structure. D'Angelo said, "This organization cannot become one of the five major technology companies. OpenAI has a different essence, and I hope we can do more beneficial things for the world, rather than just becoming another large-scale company."

Tasha McCauley is a part-time senior management scientist at RAND Corporation. Her LinkedIn profile shows that she started working there in early 2023. Prior to this, she co-founded a startup called Fellow Robots with a colleague from Singularity University, where she served as the Director of Innovation Lab. She also co-founded a geospatial technology startup called GeoSim Systems and served as its CEO until last year. She and her husband, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, have both signed the Asilomar AI Principles, a set of 23 principles for governing artificial intelligence that was released in 2017. (The principles were also signed by Ilya Sutskever, co-founder of Altman and OpenAI, and former board member of Elon Musk.)

MacCormack is currently a member of the advisory committee for the Center for the Governance of AI, an international organization founded in the UK, and works alongside Helen Toner, a director at OpenAI. She has also established connections with the effective altruism movement through the Centre for Effective Altruism and is a member of the board of directors for the Effective Ventures Foundation in the UK, which is the parent organization of the center.

Ilya Sutskever is currently the only remaining co-founder on the OpenAI Supervisory Board in the encryption industry. After obtaining a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, he joined the company and briefly co-founded a project called DNNResearch with others, before working as a research scientist at Google until the end of 2015. He was the original research director of OpenAI and became the Chief Scientist in 2018. In 2012, Sutskever co-authored an important paper on neural networks with legendary scholar in the field of artificial intelligence, Geoffrey Hinton, and helped lead the AlphaGo project, which used artificial intelligence to conquer the ancient and complex board game, marking an important milestone in the history of modern artificial intelligence research.

In July of this year, OpenAI announced that a team led by Sutskever and others will concentrate 20% of OpenAI's computing power on "superalignment" to help develop technical solutions and research how to regulate artificial intelligence when it becomes smarter than humans one day. Sutskever's most recent post on the X (formerly Twitter) platform was on October 6th, where he wrote, "If you value intelligence more than any other quality of humans, you will [original text] have a bad time."

Helen Toner is the Director of Strategy and Foundational Research Grants at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown University. She joined the OpenAI Board of Directors in September 2021. Her responsibility is to consider the security issues that exist in creating a world with global impact at OpenAI. Brockman said in a statement at the time, "I value Helen's deep thinking on the long-term risks and impacts of artificial intelligence."

Recently, as an expert in the field of artificial intelligence in China, Tona made headlines for her research on the role of AI regulation in the geopolitical standoff between the United States and the Asian giant. Tona's personal resume shows that she currently works at CSET and has worked at Open Philanthropy. In between these two jobs, she lived in Beijing and studied the AI ecosystem there. In June of this year, she wrote an article for Foreign Affairs titled "The Illusion of China's AI Prowess," which contradicts the US Senate testimony cited by Altman. She believes that AI regulation will not drag down the United States in the competition between China and the United States.

A Novelty in the US Capital Market

Sam Altman, the fired CEO of OpenAI, is actively discussing the establishment of a new artificial intelligence enterprise, which seems to have dampened his enthusiasm for returning to OpenAI. However, OpenAI investors are trying to use Microsoft and key employees as bargaining chips to restore his position.

Four sources told Forbes that venture capital firms with equity in OpenAI's for-profit entity are discussing teaming up with senior employees from Microsoft and OpenAI to bring Altman back, despite Altman indicating to some that he plans to start a new startup.

Can these companies exert enough pressure to complete this move, and at a fast enough pace to maintain Altmann's interest - but the result was a failure.

According to a source familiar with the matter, the strategy of these companies is simple: they are using a three-pronged approach of massive resistance from senior researchers, Microsoft withholding cloud computing credit, and potential lawsuits from investors to force OpenAI's proxy CEO, Mira Murati, and the new management team under the remaining board leaders to acknowledge that their situation is unsustainable.

Faced with such a combination strategy, people believe that management will have to re-accept Altman, which is likely to lead to those who are believed to have pushed for Altman's dismissal subsequently leaving, including co-founder Ilya Sutskever and OpenAI board member and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo.

Two sources said that if this measure cannot be completed in time, Altman and former OpenAI president Greg Brockman will raise funds for a new startup. One source added, "If they can't solve this problem quickly, the two will continue to establish Newco."

The camps of Altman and OpenAI had set two negotiation deadlines on Saturday and Sunday at 5 pm Pacific Time, but ultimately failed to reach an agreement.

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