OpenAI drama is all about Sam Altman vs Ilya Sutskever: Ilya who? Well, we tell you

Something surprising happened at OpenAI when Sam Altman, one of the company's co-founders and CEOs, was suddenly let go by the board last Saturday. They accused him of not being clear in his communication but didn't say exactly what he did wrong. After he left, there was an attempt to bring him back to the company, but it didn't work out. Throughout all this, there was a lot of talk about Ilya Sutskever, who's also on the board and is the only co-founder left after Altman and Greg Brockman left the company.

As per various sources, Sutskever had a huge role to play in Altman's ouster, in fact, he was the one to call up Altman at an odd hour and inform him about his removal via Google Meet. That is because as noted journalist Kara Swisher points out that Altman and Sutskever had a lot of disagreements over the way the technology was evolving.
Altman clashed with other board members about how quickly they should develop their technology and make money. Ilya Sutskever disagreed with Altman about this. Swisher highlighted that Altman and Sutskever were on different sides of this disagreement.

During a meeting with all the employees, Sutskever said that what happened wasn't a "hostile takeover," meaning it wasn't an aggressive or unfriendly attempt to take control of the company. He said it was done to protect what the company stands for and its goals.

A memo written by OpenAI's chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, and seen by Axios (a news outlet), told the team that Altman and another co-founder leaving wasn't because they did something wrong with money, business, safety, or how they handle private information. Instead, it was because Altman had trouble communicating well with the board. From what it appears, Sutskever was not entirely happy about how fast the AI technology was evolving. "AI is a great thing. It will solve all the problems that we have today. It will solve unemployment, disease, poverty," he said in a recent documentary for The Guardian. "But it will also create new problems. The problem of fake news is going to be a million times worse. Cyber attacks will become much more extreme. We will have totally automated AI weapons."

At OpenAI and similar companies working on advanced language models, they use a method called reinforcement learning with human feedback to make sure these models are in line with what people want. However, Sutskever, thinks this method won't work well as these models become extremely intelligent (he calls it "superintelligence").

Now that we know that Altman is not going back to OpenAI, a new update regarding his career move was shared by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on X. In a news that might shock the world, Altman and his counterpart, Greg Brockman, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new AI research team.