Before Altman's ouster, OpenAI's board was divided and in conflict

Sam Altman confronted a member over a research paper covering the company, while directors disagreed for months over who is expected to fill vacancies on the board of directors.

Before Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI last week, he and the board of directors of the company had been bickering for over a year. The tension grew as OpenAI became a mainstream name thanks to its popular chatbot ChatGPT.

At one point, Mr. Altman, the director general, made the decision to withdraw. one of the board members because he thought a research paper she co-wrote was critical of the company.

Another member, Ilya Sutskever, thought that Mr. Altman wasn't always being honest when speaking with the board. And some board members worried that Mr. Altman was too focused on expansion when they wanted to balance that growth with AI. security.

News of his expulsion came during a video conference Friday afternoon, when Mr. Sutskever, who had worked closely with Mr. Altman at OpenAI for eight years, read him a statement. The decision stunned OpenAI employees and exposed board members to tough questions about their qualifications to lead such a prestigious company.

These tensions apparently ended Tuesday evening when Mr. Altman was reinstated as chief executive. Mr. Sutskever and other critics of Mr. Altman were excluded from the board, whose members now include Bret Taylor, an early Facebook executive and former co-chief executive of Salesforce, and Larry Summers, the former secretary of the Treasury Department. The only survivor is Adam D'Angelo, chief executive of the question-and-answer site Quora.

The OpenAI debacle illustrated how building AI Systems tests whether businessmen who want to make money from artificial intelligence can work in sync with researchers who worry that what they build could eventually eliminate jobs or become a threat if technologies such as weapons autonomous systems spiral out of control.

OpenAI launched in 2015 with an ambitious plan to one day create a superintelligent automated system capable of doing anything a human brain can do . But friction plagued the company's board of directors, which could not even agree on replacing the members who had resigned.

Before Mr. Altman's return, the existence of the company was maintained. was in doubt. Almost all of OpenAI's 800 employees had threatened to follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft, which had asked him to run an AI company. laboratory with Greg Brockman, who stepped down as president and chairman of the board of directors of OpenAI in solidarity with Mr. Altman.

The board of directors had told Mr. Brockman that he would no longer be OpenAI's chairman, but invited him to stay at the company, although he was not invited to the meeting at which the decision was made. taken to oust him from the board and Mr. Altman from the company.

OpenAI's board problems can be traced back to the early days of the non-profit start-up. In 2015, Mr. Altman teamed up with Elon Musk and others, including Mr. Sutskever, to create a nonprofit organization aimed at developing AI. it was safe and beneficial for humanity. They planned to raise money from private donors for their mission. But within a few years, they realized that their computing needs required far more financing than they could obtain from individuals.

After Mr. Musk left In 2018, they created a for-profit subsidiary that began raising billions of dollars from investors, including $1 billion from Microsoft. They said the subsidiary would be controlled by the nonprofit board and that each director's fiduciary duty would be to "humanity, not OpenAI's investors," the company said on its website .