At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company’s board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck.
Nadella has an easygoing demeanor, but he was so flabbergasted that for a moment he didn’t know what to say. He’d worked closely with Altman for more than four years and had grown to admire and trust him. Moreover, their collaboration had just led to Microsoft’s biggest rollout in a decade: a fleet of cutting-edge A.I. assistants that had been built on top of OpenAI’s technology and integrated into Microsoft’s core productivity programs, such as Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint. These assistants — essentially specialized and more powerful versions of OpenAI’s heralded ChatGPT — were known as the Office Copilots.
Unbeknownst to Nadella, however, relations between Altman and OpenAI’s board had become troubled. Some of the board’s six members found Altman manipulative and conniving — qualities common among tech C.E.O.s but rankling to board members who had backgrounds in academia or in nonprofits. They felt Sam had lied, a person familiar with the board’s discussions said. These tensions were now exploding in Nadella’s face, threatening a crucial partnership.
Microsoft hadn’t been at the forefront of the technology industry in years, but its alliance with OpenAI — which had originated as a nonprofit, in 2015, but added a for-profit arm four years later — had allowed the computer giant to leap over such rivals as Google and Amazon. The Copilots let users pose questions to software as easily as they might to a colleague — Tell me the pros and cons of each plan described on that video call, or What’s the most profitable product in these twenty spreadsheets? — and get instant answers, in fluid English. The Copilots could write entire documents based on a simple instruction. (Look at our past ten executive summaries and create a financial narrative of the past decade.) They could turn a memo into a PowerPoint. They could listen in on a Teams video conference, then summarize what was said, in multiple languages, and compile to-do lists for attendees.
Building the Copilots had involved sustained coöperation with OpenAI, and the relationship was central to Nadella’s plans for Microsoft. In particular, Microsoft had worked with OpenAI engineers to install safety guardrails. OpenAI’s core technology, called GPT, for generative pre-trained transformer, was a kind of A.I. known as a large language model.
GPT had learned to mimic human conversation by devouring publicly available texts from the Internet and other digital repositories and then using complex mathematics to determine how each bit of information was related to all the other bits, explained a spokesperson from Microsoft. Although such systems had yielded remarkable results, they also had notable weaknesses: a tendency to hallucinate, or invent facts; a capacity to help people do bad things, such as generate a fentanyl recipe; an inability to distinguish legitimate questions (How do I talk to a teenager about drug use?) from sinister inquiries (How do I talk a teenager into drug use?). Microsoft and OpenAI had honed a protocol for incorporating safeguards into A.I. tools that, they believed, allowed them to be ambitious without risking calamity.
The release of the Copilots — a process that began this past spring with select corporate clients and expanded more broadly in November — was a crowning moment for the companies, and a demonstration that Microsoft and OpenAI would be linchpins in bringing artificial intelligence to the wider public. ChatGPT, launched in late 2022, had been a smash hit, but it had only about fourteen million daily users. Microsoft had more than a billion.
However, the recent firing of Sam Altman put this partnership at risk. Altman’s leadership had been instrumental in the success of OpenAI and the development of the Copilots. The tensions between him and OpenAI board members highlighted the challenges of bridging the gap between tech-focused leaders and those from academia and nonprofits. While initially shocked by the news, Nadella and Microsoft had to navigate this crisis to protect their investment and ensure the future of the Office Copilots.
The fallout from Altman’s firing threatened to disrupt the progress and innovations achieved through the Microsoft-OpenAI partnership. The Copilots had revolutionized productivity by enabling users to gain instant answers and compose entire documents effortlessly. With the integration of safety guardrails, Microsoft aimed to maximize the potential of OpenAI’s technology while minimizing risks. The release of Copilots had been a significant milestone, bringing the power of artificial intelligence to a wide user base.
For now, Microsoft and OpenAI are faced with the challenge of regaining stability and finding a resolution to the conflicts that led to Altman’s departure. Their partnership, which had allowed Microsoft to surpass competitors like Google and Amazon, now hangs in the balance. As the situation unfolds, the technology industry and Microsoft’s vast user base eagerly await updates and hope for a resolution that will enable further innovation and advancements in artificial intelligence.
