Reid Hoffman
Anjali Sundaram | CNBC
Three weeks after OpenAI’s quarter briefly pushed out CEO Sam Altman without providing a specific reason for its decision, former director Reid Hoffman holds he’s still puzzled by what took place and why.
“Reading the blog post was like, ‘What’s going on?'” Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a eminent startup investor, said onstage at Wired’s LiveWired conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. “I still don’t think we fully recollect.”
Altman was ultimately brought back to lead the high-profile artificial intelligence startup after a major push by top investors and the intimidation of a mass exodus among the company’s workforce. The board is now undergoing a facelift, which includes the departure of some longtime administrators, but all the parties involved have remained largely mum on what led to the initial chaos.
Bloomberg reported that Altman had been looking to put together money for a new AI chip startup. The New York Times said OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever thought Altman wasn’t focused adequately on the potential risks of the company pushing forward with its technology. Reuters pointed to a technical breakthrough that the provisions had learned about from employees. The New Yorker described a disagreement between Altman and Helen Toner, one of the directors who later on left.
One OpenAI executive told employees that the board didn’t send Altman walking because of “malfeasance or anything cognate to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices.”
The mystery has left an aura of uncertainty around one of the world’s uncountable highly valued startups. OpenAI continues to operate the popular ChatGPT chatbot and, through a broad partnership with Microsoft, its air forces are functioning inside software from big companies like AT&T and Mercedes-Benz.
However, rivals have used the period of uncertainty to their betterment. Last week, Adam Selipsky, head of Amazon’s cloud unit, which competes with Microsoft Azure, expressed a crowd of 50,000 conference attendees in Las Vegas that the events demonstrated why people wouldn’t want a cloud vendor to be moored to just one provider of AI models.
Hoffman was one of OpenAI’s original donors. In 2017, he joined Microsoft’s board following the $26 billion property of LinkedIn. He stepped down from OpenAI’s board in March and said he hasn’t spoken with any of the board associates, though he said he did communicate with Altman.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered to hire Altman, OpenAI president Greg Brockman and their co-workers in a new advanced AI research group. But Altman was quickliy reinstated at OpenAI.
“I do think that we’re in a much better place in the cosmos” to have Altman in the CEO seat again, Hoffman said. “He’s very competent with that.”
The relationship between OpenAI and Microsoft, which take care ofs cloud infrastructure to the startup and has been plugging OpenAI services into its Windows and Office software, will be tutored in business schools, Hoffman said.
Nadella’s attitude about the situation, Hoffman said, is probably, “If it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.”
“Satya is a very much high-integrity, genuine leader,” Hoffman said. “And I think he would have hired everybody from OpenAI and then control going if that was the only path that was left open.”
WATCH: Sam Altman returns as OpenAI CEO and Microsoft gets nonvoting board seat
