Commentary: OpenAI’s About Face on CEO Firing Points to Growing Pains in AI Sector

Thanksgiving Day weekend is usually a quiet one for American industry, and this year was no exception. Things were quiet even at OpenAI, the firm behind the generative AI tool ChatGPT, unlike the previous weekend when the sudden ouster of CEO Sam Altman created a flurry of events that eventually resulted in Altman being reinstated as the company’s CEO.

The bizarre sequence of events started when OpenAI’s board dismissed Altman, questioning his communications with the board. Not long after his firing, Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s key customers, named Altman to head a newly formed group within Microsoft looking at advanced AI.  But last Monday, OpenAI said that Altman would be reinstated as the company’s CEO.

Without a doubt, OpenAI’s board reinstated Altman to save face upon realizing their initial ouster of Altman was a blunder, as pressure from investors and company employees mounted. But the face-saving measure just reinforces that the company’s moves all along have been rash and not well-thought out, and points to a lack of accountability in the company’s governance.

As the use of AI grows, concerns mount over the possible lack of transparency and unethical practices companies could potentially engage in. While no one believes AI inspired any of the decisions OpenAI’s governance made, the chain of events indicates the company may be lacking proper procedures and protocol to make high-level decisions such as executive hirings and firings.

The chain of events surrounding OpenAI also took several other high-level executives on a merry-go-round for several days. Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, was named interim CEO when Altman was initially ousted, only to be “demoted” back to chief technology officer when Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Amazon’s streaming service Twitch, was named OpenAI’s interim CEO. But Shear also lost out when Altman was allowed to resume his role as Open AI’s CEO.

While Altman’s return to OpenAI may have appeased investors and some employees, the jury is still out on OpenAI. The company revised its Board of Directors, with its new members to include Bret Taylor, former co-CEO of Salesforce; and Larry Summers, former U.S. Treasury Secretary. But industry observers have expressed concern that the reconstituted board apparently lacks expertise in issues related to the responsible implementation of AI.

The Influence of Big Tech on AI

There’s an additional angle to this story. As Microsoft is a key customer, OpenAI was obviously concerned about losing support from them. According to some industry observers, there’s a concern brewing that large tech companies such as Microsoft, Meta, and Google may have too much pull in the fledging AI area, and suggest that AI platforms become decentralized.

For instance, a company called Opentensor Foundation is advocating the development of the Bittensensor Protocol, a peer-to-peer machine-learning protocol that gives participants incentives to train and operate machine-learning models in a distributed manner.

Whether such a model can help create a sort of check-and-balance system in the AI sector remains to be seen. But what is obvious is that AI companies collectively will need to act more responsibly as the growth of the technology takes greater hold at more levels and mishaps could have greater ramifications for many people.