Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is ready to move on from Sam Altman’s ousting drama

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella spoke at the 2024 Fast Company Innovation Panel.

Sam Altman’s sudden ousting from OpenAI stunned the tech industry only last November, but Microsoft’s CEO has already moved on from the drama.

During the 2024 Fast Company Innovation Panel, Satya Nadella said that Altman’s brief expulsion feels like “a long-lost memory.”

“At this point, everything that ends well is good,” he said.

Altman returned as OpenAI’s CEO after receiving widespread support from his former employees and others in the tech community.

The two tech giants were already deeply tied together with Microsoft’s initial $1 billion investment into OpenAI five years ago, which eventually extended to a reported $10 billion partnership by January 2023.

But then the bombshell news dropped in November 2023 — OpenAI’s nonprofit board announced Altman’s departure, citing that the CEO was “not consistently candid in his communications” and that the board “no longer has confidence in his ability” to lead the company.

Nadella was firm that Altman’s controversy was not going to make Microsoft budge in its support of both Altman and the AI startup it invested in.

“I was very, very clear that we would be partnered with OpenAI and that we were also going to make sure that we backed Sam whatever he did,” he said.

Nadella even offered Altman a position at Microsoft just three days after he was booted from the ChatGPT maker. Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who said at the time he’d been removed from the board and then said he was quitting the company, were announced to “lead a new advanced AI research team” along with other colleagues.

Although Altman and Brockman would both quickly return to OpenAI, Nadella remained supportive and tweeted at the time that the company was “encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board.”

“I thought the employees and the board and Sam all coming back together to build a consequential company for the future has been a great outcome for everyone concerned,” Nadella said at the innovation festival.

While the two companies have remained intertwined, Microsoft has been continuing to build up its own AGI efforts.

Microsoft announced in March that it had hired Mustafa Suleyman, the cofounder of DeepMind, and Karén Simonyan, cofounder of Inflection AI, to lead a newly formed division called Microsoft AI.

The division has been quietly building an in-house AI model dubbed MAI-1 — separate from OpenAI, The Information first reported.

Meanwhile, OpenAI has also kept itself busy, last week unveiling its latest model, o1, which is designed to think before it responds by producing “a long internal chain of thought,” the company said.

And OpenAI is also reportedly in talks to raise $6.5 billion more from investors at a massive $150 billion valuation, which would vault it into the realms of the highest-valued startups.

According to a report from Bloomberg, Microsoft is in talks to participate in the funding round.

Microsoft and OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17.