On Friday, OpenAI, the Microsoft-funded operator of ChatGPT, fired its CEO, Sam Altman. Then, after five days of popcorn-emoji chaos, they hired him back. The sudden move, which billion-dollar investor Microsoft only learned about moments before it was released to the public, seems to have come from a fight between Altman and engineer Ilya Sutskever, who is in charge of “alignment” at the company. Sutskever’s faction, including board member Helen Toner, whose feud with Altman may have precipitated these events, is out. Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president who doubted that women are good at science, is in. Altman’s return means that, in a fight about profit versus safety, profit won.

Or maybe safety did? OpenAI is a weird company, and their renewed charter reemphasizes their original goal: to save humanity from the very technology they are inventing.

Both sides in this fight think artificial general intelligence (“AGI,” or human-level intelligence) is close. Altman said, the day before he was fired, that “four times” — one within the last few weeks — he had seen OpenAI scientists push “the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward.” Sutskever worries about AI agents forming megacorporations with unprecedented power, leads employees in the chant “Feel the AGI! Feel the AGI!,” and reportedly burned an effigy of of an “unaligned” AGI to “symbolize OpenAI’s commitment to its founding principles.” Toner hails from Georgetown University by way of University of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute, a leading research institute for the perpetuation of pseudoscience fiction ideology run by the philosopher Nick Bostrom.