Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella ready to move on from Sam Altman ouster drama

• Microsoft CEO says Sam Altman’s brief ouster from OpenAI feels like a “long-lost memory.”

• Microsoft had announced a multi-year investment in OpenAI in 2023.

• Microsoft is building its own AI model, MAI-1, while OpenAI recently unveiled its latest model, o1.

Sam Altman’s sudden ouster from OpenAI stunned the tech industry last November, but the Microsoft CEO has already moved on.

At the Fast Company 2024 innovation panel, Satya Nadella said Altman’s brief ouster felt like “a long-lost memory.”

“At this point, all that ends well is good,” he said.

Altman returned to the role of CEO of OpenAI after receiving widespread support from his former employees and others in the tech community.

The two tech giants were already closely tied since Microsoft’s initial $1 billion investment in OpenAI five years ago, which eventually expanded to a $10 billion partnership by January 2023.

But the next bombshell came in November 2023: The board of directors of the nonprofit OpenAI announced Altman’s departure, saying the CEO was “not always candid in his communications” and that the board “no longer had confidence in his ability” to lead the company.

Nadella said the Altman controversy would not cause Microsoft to change its mind about supporting Altman and the AI ​​startup he invested in.

“I was very, very clear that we would be partnering with OpenAI and that we would also make sure that we supported Sam in whatever he did,” he said.

Nadella even offered Altman a job at Microsoft just three days after he fired the creator of ChatGPT. Altman and OpenAI CEO Greg Brockman, who said at the time that he had been removed from the board and was leaving the company, were tapped to “lead a new advanced AI research team” with other colleagues.

Although Altman and Brockman quickly returned to OpenAI, Nadella remained supportive of the company, tweeting at the time that the company was “encouraged by the changes on the OpenAI board.”

“I think it was a great result for everyone involved to have the employees, the board and Sam come together to build a company that is important for the future,” Nadella said at the innovation festival.

Although the two companies remained closely tied, Microsoft continued to develop its own AGI efforts.

Microsoft announced in March that it had hired DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman and Inflection AI co-founder Karen Simonyan to lead a newly created division called Microsoft AI.

The division has quietly built an internal AI model dubbed MAI-1, separate from OpenAI, The Information first reported.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has also been busy, unveiling last week its latest model, o1, which is designed to think before it responds by producing “a long internal chain of thought,” the company said.

OpenAI is also reportedly in talks to raise an additional $6.5 billion from investors, at a massive $150 billion valuation, which would propel it into the realm of highly valued startups.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Microsoft is in talks to participate in the funding round.

Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

Read the original article on Business Insider