Microsoft has offered to match the pay of any OpenAI employees who move to work for them.
It caused a stir when Sam Altman was fired as CEO on Friday, which led to an offer to lead “a new advanced AI research team” at Microsoft.
Almost everyone who works at OpenAI has said they will quit if he and co-founder Greg Brockman are not brought back.
It’s still not clear if Mr. Altman will join Microsoft in the end, since Microsoft is by far OpenAI’s biggest backer.
An engineering manager at OpenAI named Evan Morikawa said that 743 of the company’s 770 workers have signed a letter calling for the board to step down. The employees have also threatened to leave if their demands are not met.
In their letter, they said they had been offered jobs at Microsoft. Kevin Scott, the company’s CTO, has now confirmed this and promised staff that “if needed,” Microsoft will hire them for a position that “matches your compensation.”
It’s not clear what will happen with Mr. Altman either. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told CNBC that he might not be joining and that he was “committed to OpenAI and Sam, irrespective of what configuration.”
“Obviously, that depends on the people at OpenAI staying there or coming to Microsoft, so I’m open to both options,” he stated.
Changing Things
On Monday, Mr. Nadella told CNBC that “something has to change” at OpenAI, the company that made the ChatGPT robot. He didn’t say what that was, but he did say that the tech giant might get a seat on the board.
Microsoft has a lot of money invested in OpenAI and uses a lot of its technology in its products, but the two companies do not yet have any executive connections.
“At this point, I think it’s very, very clear that something has to change around the governance,” stated Mr. Nadella.
“We’ll have a good dialogue with their board on that.”
A round of interviews with the media showed how calm the CEO of Microsoft was, which is different from the chaos at OpenAI, where employees are openly protesting Mr. Altman’s exit.
They want him to come back and the board to be fired, but it’s still not clear what is happening with the company’s former CEO.
How OpenAI made it possible for chaos to happen
Nathan Benaich, a partner at Air Street Capital, a company that has invested in many AI startups, praised Mr. Nadella for the choices he made after firing Mr. Altman.
He told them, “This is great deal-making.”
It looks like Microsoft is in an even stronger situation now. The company has the two leaders of OpenAI—the money and the ability to hire smart people—and is spending $50 billion to build a crazy computer infrastructure.
“This is larger than some of the most ambitious government-funded research projects.”
Moments of shock
Emmett Shear, who used to be the head of Twitch and is now the new temporary head of OpenAI after Mr. Altman’s rude departure, is in the middle of all of this.
They met years ago when they were both in the start-up investment school, Y Combinator. A picture of the two of them together is going viral on social media.
Among the people in the picture who went on to have successful careers in tech are Aaron Swartz, who died in 2013 and was a famous internet freedom fighter and one of the first people to work on the website Reddit.
Mr. Shear helped create the popular game website Twitch and grew it into the world’s biggest live-streaming site. In 2014, he sold the company to Amazon for about $970 million ($774 million).
He stayed on as CEO of Amazon until March 2023, when he quit because his son was born.
But he has been getting a lot of attention online for some of the tweets he has sent since leaving the company, like the ones where he publicly criticised Microsoft.
Mr. Shear and OpenAI have not replied to a request for feedback.
