The creator of ChatGPT, Open AI, announced on Friday that Sam Altman, its co-founder and CEO, had been fired following an investigation that revealed he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors.
The AI startup released a statement saying, “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
Since launching ChatGPT a year ago, Mr. Altman has become a sought-after expert in Silicon Valley on the potential benefits and risks of artificial intelligence. However, the abrupt and mostly inexplicable termination of his business has raised questions about the future of the sector.
OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, will assume the role of acting CEO with immediate effect, the business announced, while it looks for a long-term replacement.
The release also stated that Greg Brockman, a prominent executive and co-founder of OpenAI and the chairman of the board, would be leaving his position while still serving as president of the firm. However, Mr. Brockman later stated on X, the former Twitter, “based on today’s news, i quit.”
Regarding the purported lack of candour by Mr. Altman, OpenAI refuses to respond to inquiries. According to the statement, his actions were impeding the board’s capacity to carry out its duties.
Mr. Altman wrote on X on Friday, saying, “I had a great time at openai.” It changed me personally and, hopefully, the world in some small way. Above all, I enjoyed collaborating with individuals of such skill. will discuss what comes next in more detail later.
A licencing and technological deal between the Associated Press and OpenAI gives OpenAI access to a portion of the AP’s text archives.
In 2015, Mr. Altman assisted in establishing OpenAI as a nonprofit research facility. But it was ChatGPT’s meteoric rise to fame that made Altman a household name as the face of generative AI, a field that creates original text, images, and other forms of media. This year, while on a globe tour, he was accosted at a London event by a throng of enthusiastic fans.
He has discussed the promise and risks of AI over meals with several leaders of state. Just on Thursday, in San Francisco, where OpenAI is headquartered, he participated in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference.
“The greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we’ve had so far,” he claimed, will be AI. He also emphasised the necessity of safeguards and the existential risks that could arise from AI in the future.
Critics among computer scientists claim that concentrating on hypothetical dangers diverts attention from the practical drawbacks and hazards of existing AI technologies. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has opened an inquiry to see whether OpenAI’s use of its chatbot to disseminate misleading material and scrape public data constitutes a violation of consumer protection laws.
Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist of OpenAI, and three outsiders—Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Centre for Security and Emerging Technology—make up the board, according to the business.
Microsoft, a significant investor in OpenAI that has contributed billions of dollars to the company and helped supply the processing power for its AI systems, stated that the change will not have an impact on their partnership.
An email from Microsoft stated, “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.”
Altman, now 38, has been regarded as a Silicon Valley wonder since his early 20s despite not having any formal training as an AI developer. In 2014, he was hired to become the head of YCombinator, a business incubator.
“Sam is one of the smartest people I know, and understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself,” read YCombinator co-founder Paul Graham’s 2014 announcement that Altman would become its 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.”
When OpenAI first established, it was a nonprofit organisation supported financially by Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla, among others. The organization’s declared goals were to “advance digital intelligence in a way that is constrained by a need to generate financial return, and most likely to benefit humanity as a whole.”
That changed in 2018, shortly after the company released the first iteration of the GPT big language model, which mimics human writing, and incorporated a for-profit company called Open AI LP, moving almost all of its employees into the company. At about the same time, Musk, who had co-chaired the board with Altman, announced his resignation, citing Tesla’s work on developing self-driving systems as the reason for what OpenAI called a “potential future conflict for Elon.”
The startup that OpenAI’s board is in charge of has been trying harder to make money off of its technology by focusing on catering its well-liked chatbot to corporate clients, even though the board has maintained the nonprofit governance structure.
Last week, Mr. Altman gave the keynote address at the company’s inaugural developer conference, where he presented his vision for the use of AI bots in the future to assist people with a range of chores. A few days later, he declared that ChatGPT’s premium version had reached capacity and the company would have to stop accepting new members.
According to Gartner analyst Arun Chandrasekaran, Mr. Altman has become the face of generative AI technology, thus his departure “is indeed shocking.”
He said OpenAI still has a “deep bench of technical leaders” but its next executives will have to steer it through the challenges of scaling the business and meeting the expectations of regulators and society.
Forrester analyst Rowan Curran speculated that Altman’s departure, “while sudden,” did not likely reflect deeper business problems.
“This seems to be a case of an executive transition that was about issues with the individual in question, and not with the underlying technology or business,” Mr. Curran said.
Mr. Altman can take a few different actions after this. He bet big on a number of other audacious ventures even as the OpenAI CEO.
Among these are Retro Biosciences, which seeks to extend human life by 10 years through biotechnology, and Helion Energy, which is working on creating fusion reactors that might generate enormous amounts of energy from the hydrogen in saltwater. In addition, Altman is a co-founder of Worldcoin, a biometric and cryptocurrency initiative that uses eye scanning technology to build a massive digital identity and financial network.
