Yet another twist in the Sam Altman saga at OpenAI, just days after its board fired him, allowing him and some key deputies to be hired by Microsoft. He is back at the top of.

OpenAI, the company saying in a statement.

That it had reached an agreement in principle to rehire Altman and has also met demands to revamp the board of directors. CNN contributor Kara Swisher joining us now. She is also, of course, the host of the on and Pivot podcast.

Good to see you.

This so, you know, you kind of saw this or you saw this coming, you know, the reporting that it was coming, the fact that we are in this place this morning, sam Altman coming back, a new board. What does it mean?

Well, it's kind of a new board. One of the old board members, Adam D'Angelo, who used to be a Facebook executive and he started Quora is still on it. They brought in Bret Taylor, who was the chairman of Twitter and sold that to Elon Musk. He was also at Facebook, I believe, and Larry Summers, I don't know where he came from, but there he is, obviously the economist, treasury Department and Harvard.

Yeah.

So they replaced the board that was there, which was a very small board because they hadn't replaced previous people who had left. So I expect it to get bigger. I expect Microsoft to have seats on the board. I guess they might try to find a woman, maybe three white guys. It's kind of Silicon Valley?

Might be.

Yeah, I think it's going to be a much yeah, it might be. It'll probably be ten person board or nine or ten at least. And it changes it considerably in terms of what kind of people are on it. And it's much more professional, much more techie.

That's fair. But boards really matter to be a check.

Right on.

All understand. We all understand what a debacle this was.

My question to you, Kara, is something that you tweeted about last night was.

Did the board previous board at least.

Succeed in raising public awareness of its fear of how fast AI was moving too rapidly? In their view, yes, the cost was incredible.

But was that important?

Well, I would say it was damaging. I say it was damaging and it put more powerful companies in charge. I think it did exactly the opposite of the things they were saying. I think it's going to accelerate now quite a bit. There's ways to make points about this. Leaving the board and making a statement or something like that could have been effective. I thought this was just a ridiculous rendellay of nonsense. I called it a goat rodeo. It was a waste of time. And they still haven't said why they fired Sam Altman, who's now the CEO again. And you're going to put allegations like that out there, you certainly should have them.

Can I ask you about that, Kara? This morning, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Altman and the previous board have agreed to internal investigations into his firing, his actions, all of that.

Why is that important for humanity?

I don't think it's important for humanity. I think it's just a cover. It's a fig leaf. This board is lost. And so they'll look at it. I think a lot of the stuff was well known. I think it was just a matter of someone said, is this a bigger issue or is it petty? I think it's more petty and egos than anything else. And I think he was moving faster than they liked, and instead of dealing with it, they did this dramatic thing. And I don't know, I felt like there was nine other ways to do this, but this is the way they went. They couldn't even decide on adding new board members. You know, it was a dysfunctional board, and now we have one that, presumably, once it gets bigger, will be more functional.

We'll see.

Once the women are added, Kara, then.

We'Ll see what yeah, yeah.

Kara fisher. Appreciate it. And thank you for being so helpful with us all week long on this story.

And Happy Thanksgiving, Kara. Have a good one.

No problem.

Thank you. Thank you.

Anna Stewart is on the story. So, Anna, if people had just been away and not plugged in over the last six days, it wouldn't look like.

This was a major story.

And yet so much has changed. Talk to us about Altman's decision to come back to the company and the change up in the mean.

It's quite extraordinary. This is actually the fourth CEO in less than a week, albeit a CEO who's rather familiar because he was the CEO last Friday. This has been the most extraordinary few days. Perhaps the least surprising development of all, though, is that Sam Altman is back. Even though he was offered a position at Microsoft on Monday, it was quite clear when we had that Open letter from well, it was signed by almost all of the workforce at OpenAI saying that they would resign and also move to Microsoft if the board didn't reinstate Sam Altman. So really no surprise that he's back. But there are some changes that he's coming back to, and that is namely, as you said, the board. The board who were responsible for firing him, who were responsible for doing that without really any communication with major investors like Microsoft. So we've had a few changes. One is still there, Adam D'Angelo, who was a member of the board that took on the ousting of the CEO. The other two that we now have are new, though. You can see there Brett Taylor, who is a former CEO of Salesforce, and also, interestingly, Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary in the US.

Perhaps that will speak to the relationship that OpenAI definitely needs to have with governments and regulators around the world. So a few subtle changes there. There is no doubt in my mind, though, that the winners of all this has been Sam Altman, who has never been more valued and in a stronger position. And of course, Microsoft, the partner.

Yeah, Microsoft owning some 49% of the company.

But does this address the issue at.

The heart of this breakup and then.

Makeup, and that is the speed at which AI has been growing?

I don't think it answers it or necessarily changes anything other than it's definitely brought that issue to everyone's awareness if that was the true reason why he was fired, and the board last week were very cagey about why they fired him. They actually said that Sam Altman had been less than candid in his communication with the board, which very much sounded like he'd been lying. There was no more detail than that. But if this was about the speed of AI and commercializing it, but also ensuring the safety, that issue is definitely forefront of everyone's minds. And I think we'll still hear a lot about that from Altman and Microsoft. But they will, of course, plow ahead because this is the profitable part of the business.

Well, to be a flying to wall in a business school, trying to teach a course in what just happened. Anna Stewart, thank you so much for covering it for us.