Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI, but 600 of 700 employees signed a petition demanding his return. Microsoft, which owns 49% of OpenAI and holds the model licenses, handed Altman the full codebase so he could keep working without starting over.
You don't wake up and think that Sam Altman's gonna get fired from OpenAI, which is the most important startup in the world that has gone from $0 to $90 billion in valuation in just a couple of years here. 600 of the 700 employees of OpenAI have signed a petition saying, if you don't bring Sam and Greg back, we're all leaving. 600 of 700, including, by the way, Ilya, the main technologist, the scientist who was the guy who sent Sam a Google Meet link and was like, hey, could you join this right quick? And he pops on and the whole board is sitting there and they executed his ass. Ilya comes out and signs the pledge and says, "I'm sorry for what I did." Sam and Greg now work for Microsoft. And this is just like the ultimate checkmate move. Microsoft, not only do they own 49% of OpenAI, they also have the license to all the technology. They have the model, the weights, the inference. They have everything that they need to basically hand Sam and Greg all of the code and be like, "You don't have to start from scratch. Here you go." And so in the end, they got everything.
