All good things must come to an end and nowhere is this more true than in business. On Friday, the board of directors of OpenAI announced in a blog it was letting go of its CEO and co-founder Sam Altman, citing confidence issues as its main motivation.
A deliberative review process
“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,” noted the statement on OpenAI’s site.
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The exact causes and incidents that led to the forced resignation remain unclear for now. A mere day ago, Altman was discussing the arrival of GPT-5.
With the help and support of notable tech entrepreneurs and researchers like Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Pamela Vagata, Ilya Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, and Wojciech Zaremba, Sam Altman co-founded OpenAI in 2015.
Today, OpenAI is a well-known artificial intelligence research and implementation organization with the ambitious main goal of making sure that the advancement of artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.
Altman will be replaced by Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, who will serve as interim CEO effective immediately. Murati has been with the company for five years during which time she has always held leadership roles.
“Given her long tenure and close engagement with all aspects of the company, including her experience in AI governance and policy, the board believes she is uniquely qualified for the role and anticipates a seamless transition while it conducts a formal search for a permanent CEO,” said the company’s post.
The statement also revealed that Greg Brockman would be relinquishing his role as chairman of the board, choosing instead to focus on his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. On Saturday, however, Brockman revealed over an X message that he was quitting, citing the firing of Altman as the reason. Since then, three senior AI researchers have also resigned.
After learning today’s news, this is the message I sent to the OpenAI team: https://t.co/NMnG16yFmm pic.twitter.com/8x39P0ejOM
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) November 18, 2023
This story will be updated as more information comes to the surface.
