Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI

The OpenAI board of directors has sensationally fired co-founder and now former CEO, Sam Altman. Altman has been the very public face of OpenAI as it has risen to become a leader of the generative AI revolution sweeping the tech industry over the past 12 to 24 months. In a statement published on the OpenAI blog, it was announced that OpenAI CTO Mira Murati would immediately assume the role of interim CEO with a search process commencing immediately to identify a permanent replacement. 

The reason for Altman’s termination was briefly explained in the blog:

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.

Along with Altman’s departure from OpenAI, co-founder and chairman of the board of directors, Greg Brockman, has stepped down from his role as chairman of the board, but will continue in his regular duties at the company. While no replacement has been announced for Brockman in the role of chairman, the board will continue to function with current members, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner.

Altman responded to his sacking by posting a (all-lower case) comment to X/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. 

OpenAI burst onto news headlines late last year following the public demo of ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM) that demonstrated sophisticated, almost human-like capabilities to create written content across numerous genres including computer code, along with the ability to provide contextualized responses to queries. Although not without its issues, which range from challenges with errors dubbed “hallucinations,” its technology has been rapidly integrated by major investor Microsoft into its software under its new "Co-Pilot" branding.

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