With over 95% of OpenAI's employees ready to quit and follow Sam Altman to Microsoft Corp. MSFT, the company is now trying to unify and keep its flock together. This comes as rivals are actively trying to poach OpenAI talent.
What Happened: The open rebellion by OpenAI employees is now almost unanimous – 747 out of 770 employees have publicly come out and said they will quit if the company's board does not bring back co-founder and former CEO Altman.
The company's board is in "intense discussions" to unify the staff, according to an internal memo seen by Bloomberg. While stating that these discussions could drag out, OpenAI's Vice President of Global Affairs, Anna Makanju, said, "Know that we have a plan that we are working towards."
Even amidst this chaos, though, OpenAI's former leadership team, including Altman, CTO Mira Murati, COO Brad Lightcap, and others, have been posting messages of unity and love amongst the OpenAI team – including both former and existing colleagues.
In fact, Altman even posted a message of solidarity with OpenAI's chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever, who is also behind Altman's ouster from the company.
OpenAI developers are working to keep the systems humming despite the chaos, as shown by the company's status dashboard.
"Please know that we are continuing to prioritize stability and security of our systems. Our engineering team remains on-call and actively monitoring our services," said Logan Kilpatrick, who looks after developer relations at OpenAI.
Keeping The Raiders Away
It's not just OpenAI's leadership team that has tried to keep its flock together even as rivals try to raid the talent at the company.
When Salesforce Inc. CRM co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff offered an eye-watering cash and equity offer to OpenAI researchers, he likely wouldn't have anticipated the kind of responses he received.
"Listen, I love Slack but the company that builds Tableau isn’t going to build AGI," said Steven Heidel, an engineer at OpenAI.
Why It Matters: It's unclear whether the chaos at OpenAI will be resolved and if the company's status will be restored with Altman at the helm.
However, the company, along with its staff, investors, and leadership, are trying to keep it all together instead of getting splintered.
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