OpenAI's Board Fires Sam Altman, the Executive Who Made It Famous
In a statement on a Friday afternoon, the company said its chief executive 'was not consistently candid in his communications' and that the board no longer had confidence in him. Even OpenAI's biggest investor, Microsoft, learned minutes before the announcement.
OpenAI announced this afternoon that its board of directors has removed Sam Altman as chief executive, effective immediately. The statement said the board "no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI" after concluding that he "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board." It gave no further explanation. Greg Brockman, the company's president and a co-founder, was removed as chairman in the same announcement and resigned from the company within hours.
Nobody saw it coming. Altman appeared at a conference yesterday talking about the company's plans. Microsoft, which has invested about $13 billion in OpenAI and built its products around OpenAI's technology, was reportedly told a minute before the news went out. Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, is chief executive for now.
The board that did this is unusual. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and the nonprofit's board still controls the company that sells ChatGPT. Its members are not investors; they are meant to represent the founding mission of building AI that benefits humanity, and they have the legal power to overrule everyone else, including Microsoft. Three of the four remaining directors are relatively unknown outside the field. The fourth is Ilya Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and one of the most respected researchers in AI.
The speculation tonight is about what "not consistently candid" means, and it runs from a personal dispute to a fundamental disagreement about how fast the company should move. Nobody outside the room knows. What is clear is that the most important company in AI has, as of this evening, no leader, a furious investor, and a workforce that found out on the internet.