Days after he was fired as CEO by OpenAI's board, Sam Altman is set to return to the company. OpenAI released a statement late Tuesday saying it had "reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO." The proposed agreement includes replacing all the directors that fired Altman bar one, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo. He would be joined on the new board by Bret Taylor, formerly CEO of Salesforce and Larry Summers, formerly US Secretary of the Treasury. OpenAI was in "intense" negotiations earlier on Tuesday with Altman and the board of directors that ousted him last Friday, in an effort to rescue the embattled company. The talks were acknowledged in a memo sent to staff Monday by OpenAI's vice president of global affairs, Anna Makanju, saying that the talks included Altman, the board, and the new interim CEO, Emmett Shear.

It's been an eventful weekend at OpenAI's headquarters in San Francisco. In a surprise move Friday, the company's board of directors fired co-founder and CEO Sam Altman, which set off an institutional crisis that has seen senior staff resign in protest with nearly 700 rank-and-file employees threatening to do the same. Now the board is facing calls for its own resignation, even after Microsoft had already swooped in to hire Altman's cohort away for its own AI projects. Here's everything you need to know about the situation to hold your own at Thanksgiving on Thursday. This saga began forever ago by internet standards, or last Thursday in the common parlance.

Stepping into such a significant role can't be easy, but Shear appears to have a sense of early priorities. In his announcement post on X early Monday, he outlined three areas of focus for his first 30 days on the job: He said he intends to investigate "the entire process" that brought the company to this point, open lines of communication to partners and OpenAI employees and rebuild the management and leadership teams "in light of recent departures."

OpenAI is on its third CEO in three days, after appointing Emmett Shear as interim CEO, less than 72 hours after its board ousted former CEO Sam Altman in a shock move on Friday Nov. 17, claiming he had not been "consistently candid in his communications with the board." The company said on Friday it was replacing Altman with chief technology officer Mira Murati but over the weekend, multiple publications reported that Altman was in talks with the OpenAI board to return as CEO. After the departures of Altman and chairman and president Greg Brockman, who resigned, the board comprises chief scientist Ilya Sutskever and three independent directors: Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of D.C.-based think tank the Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Bloomberg reported that Murati was negotiating for Altman and Brockman to return to OpenAI, and that Microsoft boss Satya Nadella was playing a central role in the talks. The negotiations ultimately came to nothing, and on Sunday evening Pacific time, reports emerged that OpenAI was appointing Shear as CEO.

The firing of Sam Altman as chief executive of OpenAI on Friday took the tech world by surprise and has triggered a Silicon Valley corporate drama. Altman is not just the CEO of the company behind the ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot. He is also the figurehead of a revolution in AI that has enthralled the public and investors but also alarmed industry insiders and experts. Here we answer some key questions about what's been going on and why it matters. OpenAI is the San Francisco-based company behind ChatGPT, a chatbot that has wowed users with its ability to produce highly convincing text responses to human prompts – from writing academic essays to creating recipes and summarising lengthy documents.

After a weekend of chaos at OpenAI, the company's board of directors appointed former Twitch boss Emmett Shear interim CEO late Sunday. It was just the latest in a string of tumultuous changes at the AI company following Friday's ouster of CEO Sam Altman, and it left many wondering what kind of CEO Shear would be, why the board had chosen him, and how much he would differ from Altman. Shear was one of four cofounders of Justin.tv, In June 2011, the site moved its gaming content to its new Twitch platform, which soon became the go-to place for video game streaming, with millions of monthly streamers. Amazon bought the company for $1 billion in 2014.

On 17 November, OpenAI's board of directors unexpectedly fired the company's CEO Sam Altman. The board cryptically announced that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities". This led to a wave of rumours about the reason for the decision. Within hours, Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI, was also removed from the board and three senior researchers – Jakub Pachocki, Aleksander Madry and Szymon Sidor – also quit. Brockman later resigned from the company.

The latest development came after a chaotic weekend, where OpenAI investors and employees, blindsided by the board's move to fire Altman on Friday, mounted a campaign to get him reinstated. In its vague statement explaining the rationale for his ouster, OpenAI had said Altman wasn't always "candid" in his communications with them. The news reverberated through Silicon Valley and the halls of government, where Altman had become a major influencer of policy and regulation on AI.