An excerpt from the upcoming guide “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” affords 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 reminiscent of an OpenAI Startup Fund that was really personally owned by Altman.
On the identical time, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati have been reportedly gathering 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 must be reviewed by the joint security board, however the firm’s high lawyer denied saying that.
After Sutskever supplied this proof to board members, they moved to oust Altman and appoint Murati as interim CEO. However this shortly backfired, with OpenAI workers (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.
