An excerpt from the upcoming e-book “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” presents new particulars about why OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman again in 2023.
Written by Wall Avenue Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the e-book claims the nonprofit’s board members grew to become more and more involved after studying about points resembling an OpenAI Startup Fund that was truly personally owned by Altman.
On the identical 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 have to be reviewed by the joint security board, however the firm’s prime 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 rapidly 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.
