Ms Murati however was publicly supportive of Mr Altman, and is no longer in charge.
The board was forced back into talks with Mr Altman, reportedly at Mr Nadella’s insistence, and on Monday (AEDT) it allowed him and Mr Brockman back into its San Francisco headquarters, reportedly to negotiate his reinstatement as CEO and Mr Brockman as chairman, the return of the senior researchers, and the board’s resignation.
Mr Altman, forced to wear a visitor’s badge at the company he co-founded in 2015, tweeted “first and last time I ever wear one of these”.
In a statement on Microsoft’s website made after the OpenAI upheaval began, Mr Nadella said: “We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda … and remain committed to our partnership, and to Mira and the team. Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world.”
The sudden departures at OpenAI came just two days after Microsoft announced more than 100 updates to software and services, as part of an overhaul of its business that Mr Nadella said at the time would ultimately see OpenAI’s artificial intelligence model, GPT, embedded in every Microsoft product under the moniker “Copilot”.
The company also announced it was building an AI chip, known as Maia, which it would use to run OpenAI’s models, as well as other machine-learning models, inside the data centres that run Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.
“It’s not like(OpenAI) would have been able to build (ChatGPT) without our systems,” Mr Nadella told the Financial Review on Friday, referring to the fact that, as part of a series of deals thought to be valued at more than $US11 billion ($16.9 billion), OpenAI runs its ChatGPT service entirely on Azure.
“Our systems are powering them, we are building on top of them, they are building on top of us. So there’s a lot of co-dependency in all of this,” he said.
Still, he said, the software giant would be able to make it on its own should something go wrong with the OpenAI relationship.
“In that eventuality, it’s easy enough. You always know how to stand up on your two feet,” he said.
Microsoft was already working on another type of machine-learning technology known as a “graphormer”, as well as its own large-language model “Phi”, so “we have a lot of capability and we’ll keep going” should the need arise.
“(It’s) not like transformers are the last, big model architecture,” he said, referring to the type of machine learning OpenAI uses in its GPT models.
“But this is not all ‘we’re going to compete against with our partners’. We are trying to enable our partners to construct a true win-win with our partners and then grow the markets that we both participate in.
“A lot of our industry is a lot more focused on zero-sum, who is going to take advantage of whom, and how do we really partner only to screw them. (But) partnering well is actually an art that will help grow enterprise value,” he said.
“As long as (such deals) are win-win, they’re long-term stable,” he said, just a day before OpenAI became one of the least stable companies in all of tech.
Microsoft flew John Davidson to Seattle to meet Mr Nadella.
