After a reported revolt by OpenAI's employees and investors, the decision to reinstate Sam Altman as CEO was dismissed, and he was instead hired by Satya Nadella as CEO of an unnamed division leading "a new advanced AI research team" at Microsoft.
According to The Verge, OpenAI employees had set a 5 pm PT deadline for Sunday, by which they had threatened to resign if Altman was not reinstated. It was also reported that the staffers would go with him if the board's decision weren't in their favor.
"I love the Openai team so much," posted Altman on X. Could it mean he wants some of the employees from his former startup to follow him?
However, now that it has been revealed that Altman will soon join Microsoft, can we expect a major chunk of these employees to hitch their wagon to the tech mammoth?
More importantly, is Microsoft even hiring?
But those are not the only options that OpenAI employees have. OpenAI has a plethora of talent, and with uncertainty regarding who will be at the helm of the company set to bring us AGI, its employees might shift loyalties.
NVIDIA, a big supplier of AI chips to OpenAI, whose flagship product ChatGPT was trained on hundreds of its chips, has shown its cards.
A post on X by the company's senior AI scientist, Jim Fan, said, "NVIDIA has warm GPUs for you on a cold winter night like this, fresh out of the oven" with a punny picture of NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang appearing to be baking GPUs in an oven.
My team at NVIDIA is hiring. We 🩷 you all from OpenAI. Engineers, researchers, product team, alike. Email me at linxif@nvidia.com. DM is open too. NVIDIA has warm GPUs for you on a cold winter night like this, fresh out of the oven.🩷
I do research on AI agents. Gaming+AI,… pic.twitter.com/fVlUgSrsRc
— Jim Fan (@DrJimFan) November 20, 2023
The Information reported that AI rivals like Cohere and Adept are also reaching out to current OpenAI employees in a bid to poach them. The report also said that Google DeepMind, the AI arm of Google, has seen an influx in the number of resumes it has received from OpenAI employees.
An OpenAI technical staff member posted on X that they are quitting the company.
I quit, officially unknown employment status now.
— Tao Xu (@txhf) November 20, 2023
This is a developing story, and the repercussions of this decision are set to play out in the next couple of days, weeks, and even months.
Multiple scenarios could play out
Many OpenAI employees could resign, as they had threatened before, leading to a brain drain from the AI company. With big names like Altman and Brockman gone, OpenAI may also lose millions of dollars in valuation.
Brockman, who has also been absorbed by Microsoft, took to X to announce that their new team will also comprise of the three senior researchers who had recently resigned from OpenAI. They are – Jakub Pachocki, former director of research at OpenAI, Aleksander Madry, the head of preparedness, and Szymon Sidor, a research scientist at OpenAI.
We are going to build something new & it will be incredible.
Initial leadership (more soon): @merettm @sidorszymon @aleks_madry @sama @gdb
The mission continues. https://t.co/oAerJnMYQm
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) November 20, 2023
OpenAI has changed two CEOs in the last three days. On Sunday night, Ilya Sutskever told his staff about the new acting CEO, Emmett Shear, co-founder of Twitch, who will replace Mira Murati. Murati replaced Altman on Friday when he was fired.
Originally published on Interesting Engineering : Original article