OpenAI on Friday announced CEO Sam Altman would be returning to the company's board, along with three new outside board members. The moves come as OpenAI wraps an external investigation into the events that led to his brief ouster last year.

Why it matters: The company has been looking to move past its dramatic leadership crisis of last November.

Sam Altman got his first glimpse of Elon Musk’s boundless ambition more than a decade ago when he showed up at SpaceX’s headquarters in Southern California to meet the man who would change his life.

Altman, now chief executive of artificial-intelligence pioneer OpenAI, was then in his 20s and had recently sold his first startup for a disappointing sum. Musk was 14 years his senior and planning to send rockets to Mars. “I left thinking, ‘huh, so that’s the benchmark for what conviction looks like,’” Altman later wrote.

Elon Musk is suing ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman among others, claiming that the company he co-founded in 2015 has abandoned its mission of developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity rather than profit.

The lawsuit sets up a legal battle between two of the most powerful tech leaders as legal scholars, philosophers, and political leaders debate the future of AI.

Elon Musk is suing Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, among others, alleging they abandoned the company’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence “for the benefit of humanity broadly.”

In a lawsuit filed Thursday with a San Francisco court, Musk’s lawyers said the tech billionaire was approached in 2015 by Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and agreed to form a nonprofit lab that would develop artificial general intelligence for the “benefit of humanity.”

OpenAI's next big model "will be able to do a lot, lot more" than the existing models can, CEO Sam Altman told Axios in an exclusive interview at Davos on Wednesday.

Why it matters: Altman told Axios' Ina Fried that AI is evolving much more rapidly than previous technologies that took Silicon Valley by storm. But he also conceded that the evolution and proliferation of OpenAI's technology will require "uncomfortable" decisions.

OpenAI outlined limits on using its tools in politics during the run-up to elections in 2024, amid mounting concern that artificial-intelligence systems could mass-produce misinformation and sway voters in high-profile races.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Dall-E are some of the most powerful AI chatbot and image-generation applications available. The growth of such tools has raised worry that software made by OpenAI and its peers could be used to manipulate voters with false news stories and computer-generated images and video.

Did OpenAI’s board get a warning letter about a new algorithm shortly before it fired CEO Sam Altman?

A Reuters story last week said they did. But two people familiar with the board’s thinking tell The Messenger that they didn’t, the latest complication in a complex saga that monopolized Silicon Valley’s attention for days and has highlighted the immense interest around the technology.   

When OpenAI’s board asked Sam Altman to return a day after they fired him, he initially felt defiant, hurt, and angry.

“It took me a few minutes to snap out of it and get over the ego and emotions to then be like, ‘Yeah, of course I want to do that,’” he told me by phone on Wednesday. “Obviously, I really loved the company and had poured my life force into this for the last four and a half years full time, but really longer than that with most of my time. And we’re making such great progress on the mission that I care so much about, the mission of safe and beneficial AGI.”

Sam Altman will return to OpenAI as CEO after the board removed him from the position last Friday, the company announced early Wednesday.

A new board comprised of Bret Taylor (chair), Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo has also been established.

D’Angelo is the only member who was on the previous board that decided to drop Altman.