Microsoft has announced that Sam Altman, co-founder and former CEO of OpenAI, will join the company and lead a new AI research team. The announcement came three days after Altman was ousted as CEO of the Silicon Valley startup.
OpenAI, which developed the popular AI tool ChatGPT, has been backed by Microsoft with several billion dollars in investment. The company’s board of directors surprised everyone on Friday when they announced Altman’s dismissal, stating that he was not “consistently honest in his communications” and lost confidence in his ability to manage the company.
Following Altman’s departure, several people in leadership positions at OpenAI also left the company. The first version of ChatGPT was launched on November 30, 2022, which marked the beginning of the race in Artificial Intelligence.
Satya Nadella, owner of Microsoft, wrote on X platform (formerly Twitter) that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will join colleagues at Microsoft and will lead a new AI research team. Microsoft has already invested several billion dollars in OpenAI and has incorporated this technology into its own products such as Bing search engine.