As Sam Altman Rejoins OpenAI, Emmett Shear "Glad To Be Part Of Solution"

OpenAI announced that it has reached an agreement to bring back Sam Altman as the Chief Executive Officer and appoint new board members after nearly all of its employees threatened to quit over his ouster. In a post on X, the company said, "We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo." Further, they stated that they are working on the details of the agreement. Sam Altman confirmed the same and stated that he is " looking forward" to being back at the company. Now, Emmett Shear, who stepped in as the interim CEO of OpenAI, reacted to the news and said that he is "deeply pleased" by this move. 

"I am deeply pleased by this result, after -72 very intense hours of work. Coming into OpenAI, I wasn't sure what the right path would be. This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I'm glad to have been a part of the solution," he wrote on the microblogging platform.

I am deeply pleased by this result, after ~72 very intense hours of work. Coming into OpenAI, I wasn't sure what the right path would be. This was the pathway that maximized safety alongside doing right by all stakeholders involved. I'm glad to have been a part of the solution. https://t.co/AGoDBbwhkq

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) November 22, 2023

Mr Shear vowed on Monday to hire an independent investigator to probe the abrupt ouster of co-founder Sam Altman and reform the management team over the next 30 days as he sought to restore trust in the US start-up after a dramatic weekend. "It's clear that the process and communications around Sam's removal has been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust," Emmett said in a post on X describing his new job as a "once-in-a-lifetime opportunity".

He had also stated that he double-checked the logic before accepting the position, and Mr Altman was not fired because of a disagreement about the safety of powerful AI models. "Their reasoning was completely different from that. I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models," he had said.