Sam Altman is out as OpenAI CEO — board says he was ‘not consistently candid’. CTO Mira Murati to be interim CEO
Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, was fired from the $29 billion startup he cofounded on Friday afternoon, a stunning shake up in which the company claimed Altman “was not consistently candid” with the board.
OpenAI’s announcement, which was published in a blog post on the company website, did not provide details about Altman’s alleged lack of candor. The company said that CTO Mira Murati would replace Altman as interim CEO effective immediately, while a search for a permanent replacement begins.
“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the blog post read.
Greg Brockman will also step down as the chairman of OpenAI’s board of directors as part of the leadership change, but will remain in his role as President of the company.
In a tweet on X, formerly Twitter, Altman, 38, said that his time working at OpenAI had been “transformative” and that he “will have more to say about what’s next later.”
The surprise news of Altman’s ouster and the company’s vague hints of deceitfulness on his part spread across Silicon Valley’s tech community like wildfire. OpenAI ignited the industry-wide AI craze almost exactly one year ago, when it released its ChatGPT product.
Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and incorporated its GPT technology across its product line, saw its shares plunge 1.7% following the announcement on Friday.
“We have a long-term agreement with OpenAI with full access to everything we need to deliver on our innovation agenda and an exciting product roadmap,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella tweeted on Friday afternoon, adding that the company is “committed to our partnership, and to Mira and the team. Together, we will continue to deliver the meaningful benefits of this technology to the world.”
Altman’s departure appears to have happened unexpectedly. Just last week Altman presided over OpenAI’s first-ever developer conference in San Francisco, rolling out new AI tools and an updated version of its GPT-4 large language model.
Altman cofounded OpenAI in 2015, along with Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Elon Musk and several other Silicon Valley power players. Musk left the company’s board in 2018 citing potential for conflicts of interest with Tesla and its autonomous driving efforts.
Before taking the top job at OpenAI, Altman led Silicon Valley’s legendary startup incubator Y Combinator. Unlike some tech industry leaders known for their engineering chops, Altman rose to prominence for his ability to raise large sums of venture capital and for his bets on ambitious technology such as nuclear fusion and quantum computing.
One of the founding goals of OpenAI is to create artificial general intelligence, or AGI, the idea of a single AI system capable of matching or exceeding humans in all economically-valuable cognitive tasks.
“If AGI is successfully created, this technology could help us elevate humanity by increasing abundance, turbocharging the global economy, and aiding in the discovery of new scientific knowledge that changes the limits of possibility,” Altman wrote in February.
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