It was a weekend of absolute chaos for what many are calling one of the most promising companies of our time, OpenAI, a top player in the revolutionary field of artificial intelligence, the maker of ChatGPT, with billions of dollars in backing from Microsoft, is now in turmoil after the board fired its co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, on Friday. 72 hours later, Altman is now an employee of Microsoft, and hundreds of workers at OpenAI are threatening to follow him if the entire board doesn't resign. The employees are outraged, as details of Altman's firing remain murky. In its announcement Friday, OpenAI claimed that Altman was not sufficiently, quote, candid with the board, but they didn't delve into the specifics.

And now Microsoft, a huge partner of OpenAI, is coming out as a big winner. Ceo Sachin Adela has already hired Altman himself and some of his coworkers. And Microsoft says it is still committed to its probably a record high just today. Remember, this is not your average corporate reshuffle. Openai is a powerhouse in the tech industry, pioneering tech that once was thought to be the stuff of science fiction. Openai's products can write novels, for example, create art, build websites, and software from just basic descriptions that you give it. Essentially, it teaches computers to be smarter and more humanlike than ever before, and it can do complex tasks that normally involve teams of people and do those tasks in just seconds.

Let's dig deeper now with CNN contributor, Cara Swisher. She's also the host of the podcast on with Cara Swisher and the co-host of the Pivot Podcast. Cara, this is just a mess. You've been talking to Sources all weekend that we're close to all of this. First, tell us where things stand right now, and then step back and give us the context of what this means for AI more broadly.

I stepped away from my phone for five seconds, so I don't actually know what's happening right now. But obviously, the employees this morning, which I reported had gotten together and written a letter saying the board was incompetent and they were going to leave and work for Microsoft if they didn't step down and bring in a new board and bring back Sam, and also a guy named Greg Brockman who left with Sam after he was fired. And so I don't know where it stands. Microsoft is now going to create this new division. It certainly has an investment in OpenAI, but it doesn't have to give it all its money if it doesn't keep up commitments. And it's really hard if five, six, hundred people of a 750 person staff leave a company to keep its commitments. So it's in a crisis, and this board has to step down. I don't think it has any other choice.

Would that change anything, Cara? If the board stepped down, is there any way to reverse course? Would Altman ever come back to OpenAI? Or has the die been cast? He's over at Microsoft now.

It's a lot of... This is like a multi-player game. I don't know what's going to happen. Of course, he could come back and Microsoft could get a board seat and control. It could change the governance structure. And then Sam Alton would be fully in charge of the to buy OpenAI. It would just let it go and have Altman come there and doto do whatever he wants to do at Microsoft. Certainly a victory for Sachin and Nadella to handle this because that stock got killed on Friday. And now, of course, it rose pretty quickly. And he managed to finesse a really bad situation by a board that I have called incompetent. I agree with its employees of OpenAI and does need to step aside and how they handle this. They might have had disagreements, but this is not how to run one of the most important companies of the AI age, at least.

Well, let's zero in on those disagreements, Cara, because the new CEO of OpenAI, the third in three days, he's calling for an investigation into Altman's firing. What ultimately preceded his firing? What was that disagreement? Do we know?

I do not. I have tried to get that out of them, and that's one of the issues, the lack of transparency. They said that he was a liar, but then didn't say what he lied about, and they wouldn't be open about it. And then one of the people who led the that led the firing has now recanted and said that he supports Sam Alman. He signed that letter, which was weird. The chief scientist, he's a well-regarded technologist, and he was right in the middle of it. And then suddenly he wrote, And I'm sorry, on X this morning. I don't know. I guess I was joking. It's like the Taylor Swift song, Hi, it's me. I'm the problem. It's me, that thing. I don't know what's going to happen to this board. There's now three people left, and we'll see what they do. I think if they don't step down... I mean, you can't operate a company without employees. I suspect this morning it was 505 of them. I suspect it's very close to the whole company leaving.

Yeah, potentially huge implications for one of the frontrunners leading in this revolutionary new technology.

Yeah, I think the issue was misalignment between them and theirs and that he wasn't fully forthcoming about that. They could have handled this 10 different ways instead of just firing him. They could have had a meeting or et cetera, et cetera. Instead, they took this rather... They're very concerned about safety and everything else, but then they wouldn't give specific issues and said it wasn't a specific safety issue either. So who knows? It's the worst performance of the board I've seen in a very long time, and it's a low bar.

Yikes. Carrie Swisher, thanks so much for breaking that down with us.

Thanks a lot.