OpenAI investors want Sam Altman back, which could spell board changes

Now, Microsoft, Thrive Capital, Tiger Global Management, and other investors in the ChatGPT maker are working to reinstate Altman, people familiar with the matter told Bloomberg and others. As part of that effort, they also aim to replace the board and are reviewing possible new directors, among them former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor.

Jason Kwon, OpenAI’s chief strategy officer, expressed optimism in a memo obtained by The Information that Altman—and senior staff who resigned in protest at his firing—could be brought back.

OpenAI’s biggest investor by far is Microsoft, which holds significant power over its smaller partner in a number of ways, as Fortune reported earlier today. OpenAI depends on Microsoft for the vast amounts of computing power that its generative AI products require. And while the software giant has committed at least $13 billion to the venture since 2019, committed and delivered are two different things. It’s unclear whether OpenAI could continue as a going concern without Microsoft’s ongoing support.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who helped get OpenAI up and running as a nonprofit counterweight to Google in 2015 before the relationship soured, complained earlier this year that OpenAI had morphed into “a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.” Musk has long warned about the potential dangers of AI, though he now has a ChatGPT rival named Grok.

OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati, who joined the company from Tesla in 2018 and helped oversee the deal with Microsoft, told Fortune, “I joined when it was a nonprofit, and then obviously since then we had to evolve—these supercomputers are expensive.” She was named interim CEO after Altman’s ouster.

Also expensive is the OpenAI payroll, with the company holding onto some of…