On Friday, Nov. 17, the board of OpenAI fired the AI superstar Sam Altman as the CEO of the company. The whole world was stunned by the unexpected news including, but not only, one of the company’s major investors Microsoft whose stock price took a nose dive in the immediate aftermath. On the following Tuesday, less than a week after his removal, the board decided to reinstate Altman as the CEO. There is still no clear answer or explanation from the company as to why he was fired. Only rumors and speculations roam.
  OpenAI has a peculiar structure. It started out as a non-profit organization with the goal of building safe and beneficial Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) for humanity, funded largely by Elon Musk. The initial idea behind the company was to counterbalance Google and other big techs from dominating AI technology behind closed doors by a handful of people. After Musk stepped down from the board and took away his deep pocket in 2018, the company had to seek other means to fund the astronomically expensive project. Because the company’s non-profit goal alone was not enough to drive funding, it sought investments from the private sector and established a for-profit subsidiary within the purview of the non-profit board. OpenAI has put itself in an awkward position where it now has to serve two adversarial goals, one of which is to drive profit for its investors, and the other is to fulfill its non-profit duty to safeguard humanity from rogue AGI systems. Altman’s firing and rehiring incident seems to stem from these conflicting values that the company has been trying to balance. At least, this is the explanation, albeit vague, they are going with to justify the saga.
  Musk has been outspoken about OpenAI’s secretive policy as it goes against its very founding principles. He quite bluntly said in his tweet, “OpenAI was created as an open source (which is why I named it ‘Open’ AI), a non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft. Not what I intended at all.” The bystanders, watching as the OpenAI’s internal feud unfolds, cannot help but be skeptical about whether the faith of the human race is in good hands – the hands of a “38-year-old multimillionaire vegetarian who raises cattle and a tech leader with little engineering training,” Mr. Altman’s long time mentor said to the New York Times.