Sam Altman was fired as the CEO of ChatGPT creator OpenAI and will join Microsoft to lead a new team. This new team will focus on artificial intelligence.
Altman was fired on Friday after the board said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” After a weekend of negotiations to potentially bring Altman back, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that both Altman and Brockman will be joining to lead Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team. Altman will have the CEO title of this new group.
“We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team,” says Nadella. “We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.” Altman has acknowledged he will be joining Microsoft by reposting Nadella with the message “the mission continues.” Nadella responded by providing some hints at how he sees Altman’s new CEO role at Microsoft. “We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having you do the same.”
Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team, led by Altman and Brockman, comes just a week after Microsoft announced it has built its own custom AI chip that can be used to train large language models and potentially avoid a costly reliance on Nvidia. Microsoft has also built its own Arm-based CPU for cloud workloads. Both custom silicon chips are designed to power its Azure data centers.
Mr Altman, 38, helped launch the firm – best known for creating the popular ChatGPT bot – and has become one of the most influential figures in the fast-growing generative artificial intelligence (AI) space.
The sacking of such a high profile figure surprised industry watchers, and angered many in the company he’d led – culminating in them demanding the board members resign.
What is OpenAI?
It is a private research laboratory that aims to develop and direct artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that benefit humanity as a whole. The company was founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman and others in 2015 and the headquarter is in San Francisco.
Notable projects and releases by OpenAI
OpenAI has been deemed revolutionary for its notable product offerings, which include the following:
- GPT-3. This powerful language model serves as the basis for other OpenAI products. It analyzes human-generated text to learn to generate similar text on its own.
- Dall-E and Dall-E 2. These generative AI platforms can analyze text-based descriptions of images that users want them to produce and then generate those images exactly as described.
- Clip. Clip is a neural network that synthesizes visuals and the text pertaining to them to predict the best possible captions that most accurately describe those visuals. Because of its ability to learn from more than one type of data — both images and text — it can be categorized as multimodal AI.
- ChatGPT. ChatGPT is currently the most advanced AI chatbot designed for generating humanlike text and producing answers to users’ questions. Having been trained on large data sets, it can generate answers and responses the way a human would. Since its creation, updates to this tool have allowed it to communicate with users through voice conversation and images.
- Codex. Codex was trained on billions of lines of code in various programming languages to help software developers simplify coding processes. It’s founded on GPT-3 technology, but instead of generating text, it generates code.
- Whisper. Whisper is labeled as an automatic speech recognition (ASR) tool. It has been trained on a multitude of audio data in order to recognize, transcribe and translate speech in about 100 different languages, including technical language and different accents.
- ChatGPT Enterprise. Although this is similar to the consumer version of ChatGPT, the enterprise version lets users construct the training of their model. This edition also reflects on the recent incremental changes made to ChatGPT.
- Custom GPTs. GPTs are custom versions of ChatGPT that users can tailor to specific use cases without any code. Verified GPT builders can share custom GPTs in the GPT store and earn money doing so.