The Sam Altman drama points to a deeper split in the tech world

Even by the pace of the tech world, the events over the weekend of November 17th were unprecedented. On Friday Sam Altman, the co-founder and boss of OpenAI, the firm at the forefront of an artificial-intelligence (AI) revolution, was suddenly sacked by the company’s board. The reasons why they lost confidence in Mr Altman are unclear. Rumours point to disquiet about his side-projects, and fears that he was moving too quickly to expand OpenAI’s commercial offerings without considering the safety implications, in a firm that has also pledged to develop the tech for the “maximal benefit of humanity”. Over the next two days the company’s investors and some of its employees sought to bring Mr Altman back.

But the board has stuck to its guns. Late on November 19th it appointed Emmett Shear, former head of Twitch, a video-streaming service, as interim chief executive. Even more extraordinarily, the next day Satya Nadella, the boss of Microsoft, one of OpenAI’s largest investors, posted on X (formerly Twitter), that Mr Altman and a group of employees from OpenAI would be joining the software giant to lead a “new advanced AI research team”.