Sam Altman may still end up at OpenAI: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella

The Sam Altman-OpenAI-Microsoft saga is turning out to be one of the most surprising to emerge in the world of technology. When it seemed like the situation was over with Altman and Greg Brockman joining Microsoft, Satya Nadella threw another curveball. In interviews with CNBC and Bloomberg TV a few hours earlier, the Microsoft CEO hinted at the possibility of Altman returning to OpenAI, the house from which he was ousted. Nadella's statements only add fuel to the fire that started earlier with Ilya Sutskever's post on

During an interview with CNBC, Nadella said, "Obviously, we want Sam and Greg to have a fantastic home if they're not going to be in OpenAI". When asked whether Altman and 700 OpenAI employees would join him at Microsoft, he added, "That's for, you know, [the] OpenAI board and management and the employees to choose … [Microsoft] chose to explicitly partner with OpenAI [and] obviously that depends on the people at OpenAI staying there or coming to Microsoft, so I'm open to both options".

Nadella also addressed whether Microsoft is considering taking a seat on OpenAI's board of directors. In the CNBC interview, he said, "It's clear something has to change around the governance. We will have a good dialogue with their board on that, and walk through that as that evolves". Along the same lines, as per The Verge report, he said in the Bloomberg TV interview that Microsoft will "definitely want some governance changes. This idea that changes happen without being in the loop is not good."