Tech entrepreneur Sam Altman departs as head of OpenAI
By MICHAEL LIEDTKE
January 11, 2021 GMT
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Tech entrepreneur Sam Altman is stepping down as head of OpenAI, a leading research lab he helped start with Elon Musk.
Altman announced his resignation Monday, but said he will remain connected to OpenAI as a board member. He will be succeeded by Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s current chief technology officer.
OpenAI also disclosed that Altman will serve as an adviser to OpenAI and Musk, who serves as one of the lab’s key financial backers.
Altman, 35, assumed the leadership role at OpenAI less than two years ago, shortly after departing as president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known start-up accelerators in Silicon Valley. Altman took over as OpenAI’s CEO when the lab’s previous CEO, Ilya Sutskever, stepped down to become the organization’s chief scientist.
Even after stepping down as CEO, Altman will continue to oversee OpenAI’s more advanced projects, according to a blog post. Altman will also focus on recruiting new talent to OpenAI’s ranks, which have grown to about 100 employees since he helped launch the lab in December 2015.
“Sam is stepping back from the CEO role, but will continue to work closely with OpenAI, especially to help move forward initiatives to achieve artificial general intelligence,” Altman wrote in the blog post. “I will also be available to work with him on AGI at regular intervals.”
Altman also praised Brockman in the blog post, saying he “is the best person to lead the excellent OpenAI team through the next phase of building artificial general intelligence, which continues to be our mission.”
Founded five years ago by Altman, Musk and several other tech luminaries, OpenAI was conceived as a way to counteract the growing power of large technology firms who dominate the artificial intelligence field. Besides Musk and Altman, OpenAI’s financial backers have included PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
But the project faced a potential conflict of interest when Altman became OpenAI’s CEO. At the time, Altman was also running research into artificial intelligence advancements at Y Combinator.
OpenAI tried to alleviate concerns at that time by announcing measures to maintain a “baseline of transparency among agents” guiding the lab’s research into AI development. OpenAI also said it would notify the public whenever its AI programs achieve new levels of capabilities.
Last May, OpenAI also generated attention when it unveiled an autoregressive language model known as GPT-3 that can generate human-like text. Yet despite the hype surrounding GPT-3, some critics contend the model is still far from achieving the level of understanding associated with human intelligence.