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What happened in San Francisco last Friday

Haebom
Just until yesterday, the biggest issue in San Francisco was the APEC Summit. Top leaders from Korea, Japan, China, and the US attended in person, business figures stepped forward to share their visions and achievements. Up until Thursday, the news revolved around things like: Who did Xi Jinping dine with? Biden complimenting Chinese cars, President Yoon meeting Prime Minister Kishida, OpenAI's Sam Altman raising new AI funds, or Elon Musk skipping the Tesla opening talk—important stories and events kept stealing our attention.
But then, a single post on a website this Friday shifted everyone’s focus to a completely different part of San Francisco.
Mira Murati와 Sam Altman
"Chief technology officer Mira Murati appointed interim CEO to lead OpenAI; Sam Altman departs the company."
- https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition
CTO Myra Murati has been named interim CEO to lead OpenAI; Sam Altman is leaving the company.
Honestly, the reason for the resignation is quite simple. I don’t get why people keep bringing up sensational stuff like sisters and coups—the real story has already been laid out clearly and transparently.

The founding purpose of OpenAI

In December 2015, with the goal of promoting the safe progress of artificial intelligence and bringing benefits to humankind, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever and others founded OpenAI as its first members.
As we all know, Elon Musk and OpenAI’s management had major disagreements about this vision, which eventually led to friction and Musk’s departure. This later became the background for Musk releasing public statements opposing Grok and OpenAI.
After the release of GPT-3.5 and chatGPT, OpenAI needed extra funding. Microsoft poured in a total of $10 billion, bringing their stake up to 49%. The shareholding structure at the time was as follows:
"Once that happens, ownership would shift to a more standard 49% for Microsoft, 49% for other investors, and 2% for OpenAI's nonprofit parent."

https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/microsofts-$10-billion-investment-in-openai:-how-it-could-impact-the-ai-industry-and-stock
Sam Altman never held any shares or voting rights himself. Microsoft tried to respect OpenAI as much as possible—Satya Nadella himself mentioned that all decision-making and management was left entirely to the board.
Here's the composition of the board:
OpenAI Members
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Greg Brockman, President (Chairman) of OpenAI
Wojciech Zaremba, Chief Researcher of OpenAI
Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist of OpenAI
External Directors
Adam D'Angelo, CEO of Quora
Tasha McCauley, CEO of GeoSim Systems
Helen Toner, from Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology
When the decision to dismiss Sam—which is all the buzz right now—was made, Greg was meeting with President Macron in France to discuss a fund, and Sam was also out busy with extended investment talks at APEC. On Friday afternoon, Sam was dismissed from CEO, and Greg lost his chairman seat.
The board’s official reason for dismissal was “inconsistent communication, withholding some information”. In the market, people are baffled—why get rid of Sam Altman, the iconic figure driving OpenAI’s success and funding? He got massive attention at DevDay just recently announcing GPTs!
The truth is, the reason's simple. There’s talk about a security incident, a sister, some kind of misconduct—but Ilya Sutskever has already explained the real reason in an official interview with The Information.
"To be honest, there are elements that aren’t ideal from a business management perspective. But we’re sticking to OpenAI’s founding mission."
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/before-openai-ousted-altman-employees-disagreed-over-ai-safety
Interestingly, Ilya was brought in by Elon Musk and had similar clashes with Musk himself. Even in 2019, he argued with Musk about the pursuit of profit through AI. It’s well known that Ilya is one of Professor Geoffrey Hinton’s top students and inherited his AGI philosophy.
Put simply, Ilya keeps saying we must accept the risks and limits of the current GPT models if we want AGI, and there are steps that need to be taken before going commercial. (He showed this stance in his interview on November 4, 2023.) To be blunt, Ilya is an idealist—he believes that right now, instead of focusing on management, OpenAI should pour efforts into R&D and safety to develop a universally usable AGI model.
He says that he knows it is not the right decision for him and his business, but he did it for the purpose of establishing OpenAI. Many people in the AI scene will remember that when OpenAI released the GPT-4 Tech Report, people called it Closed AI as a sarcastic remark. This is because OpenAI, which had previously shown truly open activities by releasing papers and source codes up to GPT-3 and DALLE-2, is no longer releasing them.
It's disappointing to see someone as clever and charismatic as Sam Altman suddenly hitting the brakes after such a wild ride. Just when things were getting interesting, it feels like it might all end. But personally, I still hold out hope—OpenAI could open a whole new chapter through fresh research releases and announcements.
Broadly, here are some directions OpenAI could take from here:
•
OpenAI dedicates more resources to AI research and development
•
Pivoting to emphasize AI safety and ethics
•
Reassessing commercialization strategies under new leadership
•
A sharper focus on user data protection and ethical AI use
•
Expanded AI education and public awareness campaigns
Personally, I think there might even be new collaborations with people like Andrew Ng and Geoffrey Hinton in this process. Sam Altman’s legend may have paused, but OpenAI’s AGI romance isn’t over yet—this story might just be getting started.
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개인적으로 일리야가 곤조 없이 바로 백기 드는 모습에 낭만주의의 한계를 느끼고 말았습니다..ㅋㅋ
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