The twists and turns of an OpenAI meltdown

File photo : Sam Altman//AFP

Paris, France  – Silicon Valley star Sam Altman was suddenly ousted from the top spot at OpenAI as it led the race to artificial intelligence, only for the ambitious tech guru to be scooped up by Microsoft.

Here’s a look at the bizarre and dramatic sequence of events in the still-unfolding saga that has put the future of OpenAI in doubt, even as the technology it champions is poised to flourish.

What is Microsoft’s interest?

Microsoft has been an OpenAI partner for seven years, pouring billions of dollars into the startup and weaving its innovations into Microsoft products.

Computing power hosted in the cloud at Microsoft data centers has been essential to training large-scale language models, making possible OpenAI’s ChatGPT released a year ago for public use.

In exchange, Microsoft has infused ChatGPT technology into software like Word and…