Around 500 employees at OpenAI have threatened to leave the artificial intelligence (AI) firm unless the board resigns and reinstates Sam Altman as the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) along with co-founder Greg Brockman. According to a report by Wired on Monday (Nov 20), these 490 employees wrote a letter to the board saying, “The process through which you terminated Sam Altman and removed Greg Brockman from the board has jeopardized all of this work and undermined our mission and company.”
“Your conduct has made it clear you did not have the competence to oversee OpenAI,” the letter added. This letter just comes hours after it was announced Altman and Brockman would be joining Microsoft to head a new advanced AI research unit.
The staff also said that they would join Altman at Microsoft unless their demands were met.
The report said that one of the signatories of this letter was OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever who is also a member of the board. Sutskever was blamed for coordinating the coup against Altman in the first place.
In a post on X, he said, “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”