The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
OpenAI abruptly fires its co-founder
Board faults CEO Sam Altman for lack of candor.
ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Friday it has pushed out its co-founder and CEO Sam Altman after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors.
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the artificial intelligence company said in a statement.
In the year since Altman catapulted ChatGPT to global fame, he has become Silicon Valley’s sought-after voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence, and his sudden and mostly unexplained exit brought uncertainty to the industry’s future.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, will take over as interim CEO effective immediately, the company said, while it searches for a permanent replacement.
The announcement also said another OpenAI co-founder and top executive, Greg Brockman, the board’s chairman, would
step down from that role but remain at the company, where he serves as president. But later on X, formerly Twitter, Brockman posted a message he sent to OpenAI employees in which he wrote, “based on today’s news, i quit.”
In another X post on Friday night, Brockman said Altman was asked to join a video meeting at noon Friday with the company’s board members, minus Brockman, during which OpenAI co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever informed Altman he was being fired.
“Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” Brockman wrote, adding that he was informed of his removal from the board in a separate call with Sutskever a short time later.
OpenAI declined to answer questions on what Altman’s alleged lack of candor was about. The statement said his behavior was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.
Altman posted Friday on X: “i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later.”
Altman helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit research laboratory in 2015. But it was ChatGPT’s explosion into public consciousness that thrust Altman into the spotlight as a face of generative AI — technology that can produce novel imagery, passages of text and other media. On a world tour this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in London.
He’s sat with multiple heads of state to discuss AI’s potential and perils. Just Thursday, he took part in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based.
He predicted AI will prove to be “the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we’ve had so far.” He also acknowledged the need for guardrails, calling attention to the existential dangers future AI could pose.