Being someone who follows news about Artificial Intelligence in general and ChatGPT maker OpenAI in particular, I was quite surprised to learn last week that the board of directors at OpenAI had booted its founder and driving force, Sam Altman. The board was never clear about the reasons for their decision, but at least one member suggested that Altman hadn’t always been transparent with them about the direction he was taking their flagship product. Typically, when someone is fired by the board of directors, that’s pretty much the end of the story, even if it’s the CEO. But that wasn’t the case at OpenAI at all. A revolt began overnight among workers and investors. Soon, more than seven hundred of the company’s 778 employees had signed a public letter demanding the resignation of the board and the return of Altman, threatening to follow him out the door if they didn’t agree. And it worked. The members of the board who orchestrated Altman’s ouster are gone, Altman is back, and a new board has been selected. (Associated Press)

The ousted leader of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is returning to the company that fired him late last week, culminating a days-long power struggle that shocked the tech industry and brought attention to the conflicts around how to safely build artificial intelligence.

San Francisco-based OpenAI said in a statement late Tuesday: “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board.”

The board, which replaces the one that fired Altman on Friday, will be led by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who also chaired Twitter’s board before its takeover by Elon Musk last year.

This was a truly remarkable saga in the business world that took place in quite a short period of time. The workers at OpenAI are probably reveling today in the wisdom of the founders of the country. “It’s only an insurrection if you lose.” And they most certainly didn’t lose.

If you happen to work for an organization large enough to have a board of directors, stop and think about this for a moment. How well do you know the CEO, President, or other top executives? Are there any of them that you are so absolutely loyal to that you would threaten to quit if they were terminated? Would you take the risk of being the first one to have the idea and start sending out group emails suggesting such a revolt?

The risks would be high if you did. The first version of the letter from the workers had roughly 200 signatures. I found myself wondering if the board at OpenAI would be willing to take a hit that large and simply get rid of them on grounds of insubordination. But the number of signatories quickly swelled to include virtually all of the staff. The board must have realized that by sending Sam Altman out the door, they may have invited him to take the entire company with him. They would have been left with a nearly empty building and nobody left who knew how to tame the beast that they had created with ChatGPT.

In the end, it was the members of the board who were forced to throw themselves on their swords rather than see the company fold entirely. The open question going forward is what will become of the questions and doubts that the previous board members had brought forward. Many of them had expressed concerns over the limits (or lack thereof) of the Artificial Intelligence that OpenAI gave birth to. They questioned whether there were sufficient “guardrails” in place in the event that the team realized its ultimate goal, achieving true General Artificial Intelligence and potentially allowing ChatGPT to “wake up” and experience self-realization. Those are valid concerns and we’ve discussed them here at length in the past. Now it appears that we are still left in Sam Altman’s hands. Let’s hope he’s truly as smart and prescient as we’re all hoping he is.