Microsoft joined the observer role after OpenAI's Sam Altman was fired and later rehired at the end of 2023

Amid growing antitrust issues the American multinational company Microsoft quit the board observer seat at  OpenAI citing significant improvements in AI governance over the past eight months. The tech company Apple was also anticipated to join its observer seat but will not do further on account of the regulatory scrutiny, as per the Financial Times.

Microsoft stated that the past eight months have been a monumental time for OpenAI’s growth and the company has witnessed its progress sitting on the newly formed board seat. The company doesn’t want to continue the limited role as an observer in OpenAI. It was explained in a letter sent to OpneAI on Tuesday.

In January 2023, Microsoft announced the third phase of its long-term partnership with OpenAI through a multiyear, over multi-billion investment focusing on accelerating Artificial Intelligence productive insights ensuring the collaboration would broadly benefit the world.

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The partnership was followed by the previous investments in 2019 and 2021 and extends its contributions across AI supercomputing and research independently commercializing the advanced technologies of AI.

Microsoft joined the observer role after OpenAI’s Sam Altman was furloughed and later rehired at the end of 2023 after going through a reshuffle in the board. Following that veteran researchers including Andrej Karpathy and OpenAI’s co-founder Ilya Sutskever left the company laying the foundation for a new AI start-up.

In November 2023, most of the OpenAI employees were forced to discontinue their work in the company and join Microsoft which has hired outside OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to further accumulate an advanced research team.  It was said in a report that the workers were assured of a position at Microsoft for OpenAI staff as they were threatened to join the company at the new subsidiary.

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According to Bloomberg, earlier this year, OpenAI contrived to extend an observer seat role to Apple executive Phil Schiller but following Microsoft’s withdrawal the company has no plans to shake hands with Apple taking them aboard.