Recent weeks have not been kind to OpenAI. The release of the company's latest model, GPT-4o, has been somewhat overshadowed by a series of accusations leveled at both the company and its CEO, Sam Altman. This comes at the same time that several high-profile employees, including co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, have chosen to leave the company. This is not the first time the Silicon Valley startup has been embroiled in scandal. In November, Altman was briefly ousted from the company after the board found he had not been "consistently candid" with them.

In the summer of 2023, OpenAI created a "Superalignment" team whose goal was to steer and control future AI systems that could be so powerful they could lead to human extinction. Less than a year later, that team is dead. OpenAI told Bloomberg that the company was "integrating the group more deeply across its research efforts to help the company achieve its safety goals." But a series of tweets from Jan Leike, one of the team's leaders who recently quit revealed internal tensions between the safety team and the larger company. In a statement posted on X on Friday, Leike said that the Superalignment team had been fighting for resources to get research done.

In July last year, OpenAI announced the formation of a new research team that would prepare for the advent of supersmart artificial intelligence capable of outwitting and overpowering its creators. Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist and one of the company's cofounders, was named as the colead of this new team. OpenAI said the team would receive 20 percent of its computing power. Now OpenAI's "superalignment team" is no more, the company confirms. That comes after the departures of several researchers involved, Tuesday's news that Sutskever was leaving the company, and the resignation of the team's other colead.

Less than a month after OpenAI was rocked by a crisis when its CEO, Sam Altman, was fired by its oversight board (in an apparent coup led by chief scientist Ilya Sutskever) and then reinstated three days later, the message is clear: it's back to business as usual. Yet OpenAI's business is not usual. Many researchers still question whether machines will ever match human intelligence, let alone outmatch it. OpenAI's team takes machines' eventual superiority as given. "AI progress in the last few years has been just extraordinarily rapid," says Leopold Aschenbrenner, a researcher on the superalignment team.

To truly understand the events of this past weekend--the shocking, sudden ousting of OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, arguably the avatar of the generative-AI revolution, followed by reports that the company was in talks to bring him back, and then yet another shocking revelation that he would start a new AI team at Microsoft instead--one must understand that OpenAI is not a technology company. It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to the creation of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that should benefit "humanity as a whole." In this conception, OpenAI would operate more like a research facility or a think tank. The company's charter bluntly states that OpenAI's "primary fiduciary duty is to humanity," not to investors or even employees. In 2019, OpenAI launched a subsidiary with a "capped profit" model that could raise money, attract top talent, and inevitably build commercial products.