The issue with Sam Altman's return to OpenAI

A dysfunctional company under a super-CEO is going to lead us into an exciting and frightening new world

If you have no appetite left for yet another retelling of the story about Steve Jobs’s firing at Apple, you have come to the right place. We do not believe there is anything common between that and the Sam Altman saga playing out at OpenAI.

Jobs was not everyone’s cup of tea. A lot of people found him difficult to work with, and not everyone who worked with him loved him, though they may have thought they were on to something great. Back in 1985, when Jobs was fired, it was not yet clear that he would put Apple on the path of greatness like he did upon his return to the company in 1996, by which time it was teetering on the brink of bankruptcy.

In fact, in spite of the fabled Super Bowl ad of 1984, made by filmmaker Ridley Scott of Gladiator and Blade Runner fame, the Macintosh was not an unqualified success in the manner of the iPhone. On the contrary, it was nowhere close: Several people found it underpowered. The lack of an internal hard drive and fan irked many, and the Macintosh quickly acquired the unflattering nickname of The Beige Toaster. It was the Macintosh Plus, which came out in 1986, a while after Jobs was gone, and with enough power to run new desktop software that the brand went on to become a favourite with designers and others in the creative fields.

Eventually, Jobs, who had run the Macintosh project in open conflict with another project at Apple, fell out with the board and had the ignominy of being fired by John Sculley, the chief executive officer (CEO) he had himself brought over from PepsiCo. I happened to meet Mr Sculley about a decade ago and he recounted the Jobs firing story. In doing so, he was calm and appeared to have no regrets. Sure, he was unhappy with the way things turned out at Apple after Jobs’s exit, but, probably, if he had to do it all over again, he might have done the same thing.

Mr Altman, in contrast, has built OpenAI up from zero. Currently, the company is in negotiations for raising funds that will probably value it at $86 billion. For all you know, this projected valuation could go up, seeing how Microsoft’s shares rose to their all-time high when CEO Satya Nadella briefly hired Mr Altman.

More than that, Mr Altman, at 38, has become the global face of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution in a manner that the Steve Jobs of the 1980s could not become the face of computing. Mr Altman hobnobs with heads of states and, the day before his firing, spoke at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting about the future of AI.

To the extremists, Mr Altman might also embody a threat to humanity, and that is the point of this article’s headline, which is not going to find many fans among OpenAI’s employees or the legions of Altman supporters who have sprouted around the world during the short few days since his firing last Friday.

Late on Tuesday, OpenAI said Mr Altman was returning as CEO. But that is not even half the story. Mr Altman is coming back to an OpenAI that is not the company he left a week back. To begin with, it has an all-new board of directors, with Adam D’Angelo, CEO of Quora, being the only survivor from the old board that had fired Mr Altman. More than 700 out of OpenAI’s 770 employees threatened to quit after Mr Altman’s firing. So, he would know he comes back to a company where the overwhelming majority is openly allied with him.

The episode has also shown that some of the most powerful men in the global technology industry are ardent backers of Mr Altman, Mr Nadella and Vinod Khosla being two prominent names but not the only names. This puts Mr Altman, who may join the board at a later date, in an impregnable position at a company that is defining the way humanity deals with AI.

This is also a company that, from a distance, looks dysfunctional, going by the nature of Mr Altman’s ouster, for which the only official reason we know so far is that he “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”. That is a huge reason to sack an $86 billion celebrity CEO. It is also a company that went through an interim CEO in Mira Murati, and a second interim CEO in Emmett Shear between Friday and Tuesday.

And this is the company that is going to lead us into the new world of AI that is exciting and frightening in equal measure, run by a CEO enjoying near-absolute power.

Humanity is grappling with real AI-related issues about how quickly it should be developed, adopted, and commercialised. In March, several tech leaders, headlined by Elon Musk, called for a pause in the development of AI tools. Historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari says the new AI tools threaten the survival of human civilisation..

It is reasonable to expect that the new board will be more pliant with Mr Altman’s ideas than the previous one, because his return and the manner of it have eroded the authority of the board, in contrast to the way in which Jobs’s firing had established the superiority of the board.

But, like we said, these are two different stories, and we are not going to recount the one about the time Steve Jobs was fired at Apple.