OpenAI Staff Threaten To Leave And Join Sam Altman At Microsoft: Read The Letter Here

(Reuters) – OpenAI's staff has threatened to quit the artificial intelligence startup and join former boss Sam Altman at Microsoft's new division unless the board resigns, as reported by Reuters on Monday.

Apart from Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, Chief Data Scientist Ilya Sutskever and Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap, about 500 members of OpenAI staff said they would resign, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters.

Here’s the letter that has been sent to with a warning to the OpenAI board members.

To the Board of Directors at OpenAI,

OpenAI is the world’s leading AI company. We, the employees of OpenAI, have developed the best models and pushed the field to new frontiers. Our work on AI safety and governance shapes global norms. The products we built are used by millions of people around the world.

The most intriguing part about the letter is the word of caution from the undersigned members, who warn they will leave OpenAI and join Altman and Co. at Microsoft’s new AI Research team, in which they claim OpenAI employees are openly being welcomed. The undersigned of the letter includes Mira Murati, Jason Kwon, Mark Chen and more importantly, Ilya Sutskever, who was supposedly the man behind Altman getting the boot from OpenAI.

The Altman-OpenAI saga has transpired over the last 48 hours, in which he was ousted from his position as CEO of OpenAI, then Mira Murati was put in charge in the interim, and then Emmett Shear was appointed the interim CEO by the board members.

Between all this, Altman and Brockman has been snapped by Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft where these two will be heading a new AI Research team, which many claim is a masterstroke from Nadella. It is clear that Altman has a huge backing at OpenAI and most of the company staff are willing to put their jobs in line to get Altman back into the company or ready to quit and join him at Microsoft. It is unlikely that we have heard the last in this saga but for now, we just have to wait and see where it concludes.

(With Reuters inputs)