Dozens of Staffers Quit OpenAI After Sutskever Says Altman Won’t Return

Dozens of OpenAI staffers internally announced they were quitting the company Sunday night, said a person with knowledge of the situation, after board director and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever told employees that fired CEO Sam Altman would not return.

The moves could hamper the company's ability to move forward after the shock firing. It also will likely change the course of the artificial intelligence field and embolden a host of rivals—namely Google—that have been seeking to hire OpenAI staff over the last 48 hours. Some OpenAI staff have indicated they would be interested in joining Altman if he started a new AI venture—something he was already discussing over the weekend. (Update: These people may now seek to join Altman at Microsoft. CEO Satya Nadella said around midnight that he had hired Altman and former OpenAI President Greg Brockman to head up a new AI unit at the enterprise software heavyweight.)