Sam Altman Officially Returns to OpenAI--With a New Board Seat for Microsoft

Sam Altman marked his formal return as CEO helm of OpenAI today in a company memo that confirmed changes to the company's board including a new non-voting seat for the startup's primary investor, Microsoft. In a memo sent to staff and shared on OpenAI's blog, Altman painted the chaos of the past two weeks, triggered by the board's loss of trust in their CEO, during which almost the entire staff of the company threatened to quit, as a testament to the startup's resilience rather than a sign of instability. "You stood firm for each other, this company, and our mission," Altman wrote. "One of the most important things for the team that builds [artificial general intelligence] safely is the ability to handle stressful and uncertain situations, and maintain good judgment throughout. Altman was ousted on November 17. The company's nonprofit board of directors said that a deliberative review had concluded that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board." Under OpenAI's unusual structure, the board's duty was to the project's original, nonprofit mission of developing AI that is beneficial to humanity, not the company's business. That board that ejected Altman included the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who later recanted and joined with staff who threatened to quit if Altman was not reinstated. Altman said that there would be no hard feelings over that, although his note left questions over Sutskever's future. "I love and respect Ilya, I think he's a guiding light of the field and a gem of a human being.