Sam Altman will return as CEO of OpenAI, the startup said early Wednesday morning on X, formerly known as Twitter. The move follows immense pressure from employees and investors on the board that ousted him less than a week ago.

Former Salesforce
co-CEO Bret Taylor and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers will join OpenAI’s board, the Microsoft-backed startup said, with Taylor holding the chair position. Adam D’Angelo, co-founder and CEO of question-and-answer startup Quora, will remain on the board.

“We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this,” OpenAI said in the X post.

On Monday, hundreds of employees, including co-founder and board member Ilya Sutskever, signed a letter saying that, if the board didn’t resign and bring Altman back, the overwhelming majority would move to work with him at Microsoft.

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, said in an X post on Monday that Altman and his co-founder Greg Brockman would join Microsoft to form a new AI lab.

That followed an announcement late Sunday that OpenAI had hired ex-Twitch CEO Emmett Shear as Altman’s interim replacement. Originally, the board had said OpenAI technology chief Mira Murati would assume that role, but she soon joined the parade of employees calling for Altman’s return.

“with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft,” Altman wrote in a post of his own on X.

“Returning to OpenAI & getting back to coding tonight,” Brockman wrote in an early Wednesday X post.

Immediately after OpenAI’s board announced Altman’s firing, prominent Silicon Valley investors and founders loudly voiced their concerns and even compared the move to Apple’s
decision 38 years ago to fire Steve Jobs. In 1997, Jobs would return and eventually lead Apple to create the iPhone and become the most valuable company in the U.S.

“What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs,” longtime startup investor Ron Conway said in an X post. “It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI.”

Former Google
CEO Eric Schmidt called Altman a “hero of mine,” who built a company that “changed our collective world forever.” Airbnb
CEO Brian Chesky described Altman as “one of the best founders of his generation.” And venture capitalist Vinod Khosla said he is a “once in a generation CEO.”

Nadella, who made a surprise appearance earlier this month at OpenAI’s developer conference, was reportedly surprised and upset by the announcement. His company has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and is a close technology partner, hosting hefty GPT workloads on its Azure cloud infrastructure.

“This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved,” Shear said in an early Wednesday X post. “I’m glad to have been a part of the solution.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/22/openai-brings-sam-altman-back-as-ceo-days-after-ouster.html

Means the guy know his onion. He can't easily be brushed aside.

Wow