Nearly 500 employees at OpenAI have signed a letter saying they will quit unless the board resigns. It comes after former boss and co-founder, Sam Althman, was sacked on Friday. Today, he announced he's joining Microsoft to lead a new research team. Mr. Althman helped make the company the world leader in Generative AI with the release of ChatGPT.

The.

Reasons.

Behind his.

Departure are not entirely clear, but the board said he had been, quote, insufficiently candid. His departure has triggered a stream of resignations at the firm.

In his place, they have appointed.

Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch. Our tech editor, Zoe Clyman, has more.

Hi, guys. Hello there, Shebet. The stakes are about as high as they get, not only in terms of cash, billions of dollars of it in investment, but also the future of the world itself and the way we will live if you believe the extraordinary promises made about the power of artificial intelligence. Openai, the creator of ChatGPT, has now got through three CEOs in almost as many days: Sam Altman, Miramarati, and Emmett Shear. The cards were reshuffled after Sam Altman, the friendly face of AI and co-founder of OpenAI, got the boot, and now Microsoft has thrown him a bone.

Hundreds of millions of people use this product every week. Over the last weekend, things just seemed to have imploded. It was absolute chaos, and it showed that nocompany, no company, no team is immune from the laws of corporate physics. It doesn't matter how powerful the organization is. One bad decision can be enough to derail everything.

It's.

Been a wild weekend.

Despite all this drama, we still don't know what spooked OpenAI's board so much that they decided to suddenly fire a popular boss.

They said Sam Alman hadn't been honest with them. Was he working on a project they didn't agree with?

Had they discovered a secret new AI development? Or was it.

Something very human? Was it all about making money?

Inside OpenAI, many staff want their old boss back. This afternoon, the firm's chief scientist admitted he was wrong to support the firing of Sam Alman. Remember, this is a multibillion-dollar company with an AI tool used by thousands of millions of people. But ultimately, this is a very human story. Openai is nothing without its people, is the message from staff. Zoe Clyman, BBC News.

Joining me to discuss.

Is Bill Mu, who is a technology expert and one of the world's leading campaigners on privacy and digital ethics. Bill, good to see you.

Thank you for coming on. I'm just looking here at a flash from Reuters. The Salesforce CEO says he will match any OpenAI researcher who tenders their resignation to immediately join our Salesforce team. There's a whole workforce here who could possibly resign and the sharks are in the water.

I think a touch of opportunism here from Salesforce, but they have their own AI offering and there are a lot of skilled people that are potentially on the move at the moment. The big question here is, are we going to be developing AI and tools like ChatGPT for commercial benefit or for the benefit of the world as a whole? The board were tasked with having more of an ethical than a commercial stunt. They decided that they were concerned with what was happening. They may have been responsible for applying the brakes if things went too quickly, but it appears that they slammed the brakes on far too hard and the whole thing's crashed.

Well, quite. Then we get this statement in the last few minutes from Sam Holtman who says, Satya Nadella, our top priority remains to ensure OpenAI continues to thrive. They've sacked him, but he's at a research company for the main investor, which means he still has oversight over OpenAI anyway.

Well, much talked about deal where he would move to Microsoft. It's not a done deal yet. I don't think we can count on that happening until we really see how all of the pennies fall. What we have to focus here on is where are the assets and the people from this organization going to go? Already ChatGPT and OpenAI are tied to Microsoft. They can't take their toys and play on a different cloud platform or with another large technology company because Microsoft are one of their major investors. But the question is the extent to which there is an exidence of staff from OpenAI to Microsoft, or whether there is a resolution where Sam and most of the rest of the staff stay at OpenAI and things return almost to normal.

Emmett Shear, who's come in formerly CEO at Twitch, says, Well, it seems that he's going to slow walk everything. He's ordered an investigation into how quickly things are progressing. Do you think that is what spooked the board? They were just going way too fast?

I think things were going very quickly and that's why they tried to apply the brakes. But the problem here is there have been so many revelations one after another that I think we all need to pause and take a thought here. We will understand at some point when it is revealed what it was that spooked the board, and we will see where Sam, some of his most immediate colleagues, and the rest of the staff choose to end up. What we're going to see here, however, is a massive competitive tussable for the future of AI, because every player, from Microsoft to Salesforce to OpenAI themselves, recognize that this is going to have a massive role to play in our future.

Yes. Well, it's Fibra. We can certainly say that. Bill Mue, good to talk to you. Thank you for coming on.