Sam Altman has been named the head of Microsoft’s (MSFT) new artificial intelligence (A.I.) team just days after he was ousted as the chief executive officer (CEO) of OpenAI.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced on social media that Altman will be joining the Seattle-based company to lead a new advanced A.I. research team.
Former OpenAI President and Board Chair Greg Brockman will also be moving inhouse at Microsoft to help lead the A.I. team. Brockman resigned from OpenAI in protest over Altman’s firing.
Microsoft has invested more than $10 billion U.S. in OpenAI and has a close relationship with both the company and Altman.
In recent months, Microsoft has been integrating OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence technologies into its products ranging from its Xbox video games to its cloud-computing unit.
The move to Microsoft comes just days after OpenAI’s board of directors announced that it was removing Altman, providing few details on why it chose to fire him.
In a statement, the board said that it had lost confidence in Altman’s ability to lead the company because he “was not consistently candid in his communications…”
Altman had been CEO of privately held OpenAI since 2019 and helped launch the company’s ChatGPT A.I. chatbot a year ago to much hype and fanfare.
Late Sunday night (Nov. 19), OpenAI announced that it had hired former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear to run the company.
OpenAI is currently in the process of raising additional money through a funding round that has valued the private start-up at $86 billion U.S.
Microsoft’s stock rose about 2% on news that it had hired Altman and Brockman to run it’s A.I. research team.
The stock of Microsoft is now up 54% this year and trading at $369.85 U.S. per share.
