The board of ChatGPT-maker Open AI 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. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the company said in a statement.
Quick Read
- OpenAI’s board has removed co-founder and CEO Sam Altman due to issues with his candor in communications with the board.
- Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, is appointed as interim CEO.
- Altman’s lack of transparency was deemed to hinder the board’s ability to fulfill its responsibilities.
- Altman expressed his appreciation for his time at OpenAI in a post on X.
- He co-founded OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015 and became a prominent figure after the rise of ChatGPT.
- Altman participated in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference, discussing the potential and challenges of AI.
- OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, will step down as board chairman but remain in his company role.
- The board comprises OpenAI’s chief scientist and three non-employees.
- Microsoft, a key business partner of OpenAI, remains committed to the partnership despite the leadership change.
- Altman has been a notable figure in Silicon Valley since his early 20s and led YCombinator before joining OpenAI.
- OpenAI transitioned from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity in 2018, focusing on developing large language models like GPT.
- Elon Musk, an initial backer, resigned from the board to avoid potential conflicts with Tesla’s automated driving systems.
- The Associated Press has a licensing and technology agreement with OpenAI.
The Associated Press has the story:
ChatGPT-maker Open AI pushes out co-founder and CEO Sam Altman
Newslooks- (AP)
The board of ChatGPT-maker Open AI 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.
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the company said in a statement.
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.
An OpenAI spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment 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, formerly Twitter: “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.
In the past year, he was thrust into the global spotlight as the face of OpenAI after ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness. On a world tour earlier this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in London.
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.” But he also acknowledged the need for guardrails to protect humanity from the existential threat posed by the quantum leaps being taking by computers.
“I really think the world is going to rise to the occasion and everybody wants to do the right thing,” Altman said.
As part of the transition announced Friday, OpenAI’s president and board chairman, Greg Brockman, will be stepping down as chairman of the board but will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. The statement gave no explanation for that change.
The company said its board consists of OpenAI’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, and three non-employees: Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
OpenAI’s key business partner, Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars into the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems, said Friday that the transition won’t affect its relationship.
“We have a long-term partnership with OpenAI and Microsoft remains committed to Mira and their team as we bring this next era of AI to our customers,” said an emailed Microsoft statement.
Altman, now 38, has been seen as a Silicon Valley wunderkind since his early 20s. He was recruited in 2014 to take lead of the startup incubator YCombinator by its co-founder, venture capitalist Paul Graham.
“Sam is one of the smartest people I know, and understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself,” read Graham’s 2014 announcement that Altman would become the incubator’s president. Graham said at the time that Altman was “one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent.”
OpenAI started out as a nonprofit research laboratory when it launched in December 2015 with financial backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated aims were to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shifted nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT large language model for generating paragraphs of readable text. Around the same time, Musk, who had co-chaired its board, resigned from the board in a move that the startup tied to eliminating a “potential future conflict for Elon” due to Tesla’s work on building automated driving systems.
The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.
