Read Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott’s email to CEO Satya Nadella, president Brad Smith and other C-suite executives on what made OpenAI Board sack Sam Altman
Microsoft chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, sent an email to CEO Satya Nadella and president Brad Smith, along with other C-suite executives, explaining the series of events that led to the firing of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in November 2023. An email, dated November 19, 2023, suggests that the “shock” firing was not the result of a single ideological clash, but rather a mix of a variety of issues between llya Sutskever and Altman.
Two friction points between llya Sutskever and Sam Altman
The email, posted by X handle Internal Tech Emails, said that Sutskever “had been increasingly at odds with” Altman over two primary friction points. The first point of failure was an internal ‘battle’ over computing power. As ChatGPT’s popularity surged, the demand for GPUs became a zero-sum game within the company.According to Scott, Altman’s decision to prioritise GPU for the consumer products and API division infuriated the core research teams because they felt the fundamental work was being “starved” of the resources needed for the next generation of models.
The ‘promotion’ that fractured OpenAI board
The second conflict was deeply personal to Sutskever, who – according to Scott’s email – had a hard time with the promotion of Jakub Pachocki, a researcher who had previously worked under Sutskever.After Pachocki spearheaded several major research breakthroughs, Altman promoted him to lead OpenAI’s core model development. While Scott characterised the move as “logical from a CEO perspective,” it alienated Sutskever.
Read full email that Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott’s sent to CEO Satya Nadella and other leaders
[This document is from Musk v. Altman (2026).]From: Kevin ScottSent: Sunday, November 19, 2023 7:31 AMTo: Frank X. Shaw, Satya Nadella, Brad Smith, Amy Hood, Caitlin McCabeFrank,I can help you with the timeline and with our best understanding of what was going on. I think the reality was that a member of the board, llya Sutskever, had been increasingly at odds with his boss, Sam, over a variety of issues.One of those issues is that there is a perfectly natural tension inside of the company between Research and Applied over resource allocations. The success of Applied has meant that headcount and GPUs got allocated to things like the API and ChatGPT. Research, which is responsible for training new models, could always use more GPUs because what they’re doing is literally insatiable, and it’s easy for them to look at the success of Applied and believe that in a zero sum game they are responsible for them waiting for GPUs to become available to do their work. I could tell you stories like this from every place l’ve ever worked, and it boils down to, even if you have two important, super successful things you’re trying to work on simultaneously, folks rarely think about the global optima. They believe that their thing is more important, and that to the extent that things are zero sum, that the other thing is a cause of their woes. It’s why Sam has pushed us so hard on capacity: he’s the one thing about the global optima and trying to make things non-zero sum. The researchers at OAl do not appreciate that they would not have anywhere remotely as many GPUs as they do have if there were no Applied at all, and that Applied has a momentum all its own that must be fed. So the only reasonable thing to do is what Sam has been doing: figure out how to get more compute.The second of the issues, and one that’s deeply personal to llya, is that Jakub moreso than Ilya has been making the research breakthroughs that are driving things forward, to the point that Sam promoted Jakub, and put him charge of the major model research directions. After he did that, Jakub’s work accelerated, and he’s made some truly stunning progress that has accelerated in the past few weeks. I think that Ilya has had a very, very hard time with this, with this person that used to work for him suddenly becoming the leader, and perhaps more importantly, for solving the problem that Ilya has been trying to solve the past few years with little or no progress. Sam made the right choice as CEO here by promoting Jakub.Now, in a normal company, if you don’t like these two things, you’d appeal to your boss, and if he/she tells you that they’ve made their decision and that it’s final, your recourse is accept the decision or quit. Here, and this is the piece that everyone should have been thinking harder about, the employee was also a founder and board member, and the board constitution was such that they were highly susceptible to a pitch by Ilya that portrays the decisions that Sam was making as bad. I think the things that made them susceptible, is that two of the board members were effective altruism folks who all things equal would like to have an infinite bag of money to build AGI-like things, just to study and ponder, but not to do anything with. None of them were experienced enough with running things, or understood the dynamic at OAI well enough to understand that firing Sam not only would not solve any of the concerns they had, but would make them worse. And none of them had experience, and didn’t seek experience out, in how to handle something like a CEO transition, certainly not for the hottest company in the world.The actual timeline of events through Friday afternoon as I understand them:Thursday late night, the board let’s Mira know what they’re going to do. By board, it’s Ilya, Tash, Helen, and Adam.Mira calls me and Satya about 10-15 minutes before the board talks to Sam. This is the first either of us had heard of any of this. Mira sounded like she had been run over by a truck as she tells me.OAl Board notifies Sam at noon on Friday that he’s out, and that Greg is off the board, and immediately does a blog post.OAl all hands at 2P to rattled staff.Greg resigns. He was blindsided and hadn’t been in the board deliberations, and hadn’t agreed to stay.Jakub and a whole horde of researchers reach out to Sam and Greg trying to understand what happened, expressing loyalty to them, and saying they will resign.Friday night Jakub and a handful of others resign.
