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OpenAI fires and rehires its chief executive

The non-profit board removes Sam Altman without warning; five days, a staff revolt and a Microsoft job offer later he returns with a new board, and the safety structure is gone.

category
culture
significance
2 of 5
people
Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Satya Nadella
organisations
OpenAI, Microsoft

what had to happen · 52 events back to 1943

Every event this one built on, transitively, in order. The organism has the same path lit. Direct influences are marked.

00 · One neuron · 1

  1. 1943A logical calculus of nervous activity

I · Foundations · 11

  1. 1948A mathematical theory of communication
  2. 1949Cells that fire together wire together
  3. 1950Programming a computer for playing chess
  4. 1950Computing machinery and intelligence
  5. 1958The perceptron learns
  6. 1959Samuel's checkers program coins 'machine learning'
  7. 1960ADALINE and the least-mean-squares rule
  8. 1965Moore's law
  9. 1966ELIZA
  10. 1969Perceptrons
  11. 1970Reverse-mode automatic differentiation

W1 · The first winter · 2

  1. 1974Werbos applies backpropagation to neural networks
  2. 1980The Neocognitron

II · Connection · 3

  1. 1982The Hopfield network
  2. 1985The Boltzmann machine
  3. 1986Backpropagation

W2 · The second winter · 6

  1. 1988Temporal-difference learning
  2. 1989Q-learning
  3. 1989LeNet reads handwritten postcodes
  4. 1990Finding structure in time
  5. 1991The vanishing gradient problem
  6. 1992TD-Gammon reaches world-class backgammon

III · Statistics and data · 10

  1. 1997Long short-term memory
  2. 1998MNIST and LeNet-5
  3. 1999The first GPU
  4. 2003A neural probabilistic language model
  5. 2006Deep belief networks and the word 'deep'
  6. 2007CUDA
  7. 2009Deep learning moves to GPUs
  8. 2009ImageNet
  9. 2010Rectified linear units
  10. 2010DeepMind is founded

IV · Deep learning · 10

  1. 2012Google Brain's network discovers cats
  2. 2012Dropout
  3. 2012AlexNet wins ImageNet
  4. 2013Deep Q-networks play Atari
  5. 2014Google buys DeepMind
  6. 2014Attention
  7. 2014Sequence to sequence learning
  8. 2015Batch normalisation
  9. 2015Residual networks
  10. 2015OpenAI is foundeddirect

V · Transformers · 7

  1. 2017Attention is all you need
  2. 2017Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences
  3. 2018GPT: generative pre-training
  4. 2019GPT-2 and the model too dangerous to release
  5. 2020Scaling laws for neural language models
  6. 2020GPT-3
  7. 2020Learning to summarise from human feedback

VI · Everyone · 2

  1. 2022InstructGPT
  2. 2022ChatGPTdirect

At noon on Friday 17 November 2023, OpenAI's board announced that Sam Altman had been dismissed because he had not been "consistently candid in his communications" with it. Greg Brockman resigned as chairman that evening. Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist, had voted for the removal. Over the weekend Microsoft, which had invested thirteen billion dollars and been told minutes before the announcement, offered Altman and anyone who followed him jobs; by Monday more than 700 of the company's 770 employees, Sutskever among them, had signed a letter threatening to leave. On Wednesday Altman was reinstated and the board replaced.

The board had been the mechanism by which OpenAI's non-profit mission was supposed to constrain its commercial arm. It had used that power once, and the outcome showed that the power did not exist: the staff, the investors and the customers wanted the company to continue as it was. The safety researchers who had argued for caution, including Sutskever, left over the following year.

The episode is on this timeline because it settled a question about governance that the summits were still debating. Whatever checked the laboratories, it would not be their own boards.

what it led to · 0 events downstream

A leaf, for now. Nothing in the corpus has built on it yet.

sources · 2

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