An excerpt from the upcoming guide “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” gives new particulars about why OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman again in 2023.
Written by Wall Road Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the guide claims the nonprofit’s board members turned more and more involved after studying about points resembling an OpenAI Startup Fund that was really personally owned by Altman.
On the similar time, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati had been reportedly accumulating proof of what they noticed as Altman’s poisonous and dishonest habits, full with screenshots from Murati’s Slack channel. For instance, Altman allegedly claimed the corporate’s authorized division mentioned GPT-4 Turbo didn’t should be reviewed by the joint security board, however the firm’s prime lawyer denied saying that.
After Sutskever offered this proof to board members, they moved to oust Altman and appoint Murati as interim CEO. However this rapidly backfired, with OpenAI staff (together with Sutskever and Murati) signing a letter demanding Altman’s return — which he quickly did, with Sutskever and Murati subsequently leaving to launch startups of their very own.
