As The Wire's Omar Little said, memorably paraphrasing Machiavelli: You come at the king, you best not miss.
Jaws dropped across the tech sector on November 17 last year when OpenAI abruptly announced the removal of CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman, both cofounders of the research nonprofit that later established a for-profit subsidiary. OpenAI's 700 employees were blindsided, and so was major shareholder Microsoft, which learned of the firing one minute before OpenAI released their statement.
OpenAI's board struggled to explain the firing, which a leaked internal memo chalked up to "a breakdown in communications" between Altman and the board and other sources attributed to Altman's "lack of candor," according to Axios. Over the following days, a larger story emerged about simmering tensions between the growth-focused Altman and more cautious board members like Helen Toner and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who is believed to have orchestrated the firing. But by November 20, Sutskever publicly expressed regret about his involvement in the firing as more than 500 OpenAI employees threatened to quit unless Altman returned and the board resigned.
The Sam Altman drama brought OpenAI perilously close to collapse, and even after OpenAI struck a deal to replace the board and reinstate Altman and Brockman, investors are eyeing the $86 billion nonprofit with a little more skepticism, according to Yahoo Finance. And the open warfare probably couldn't have come at a worse time, with copyright fights brewing in the courts and the federal government sketching a new regulatory framework that could dramatically impact OpenAI and the companies that rely on its technologies.