Artificial intelligence has fascinated the world for a year, but it doesn’t have the answer to everything. For example, he doesn’t know why the board of OpenAI, the company that founded ChatGPT, fired its CEO Sam Altman by this Friday. “In my last data update in January 2022, there was no information indicating that Sam Altman was removed from a prominent position,” ChatGPT responded this Saturday. The popular tool isn’t the only one that doesn’t have an answer. The sudden dismissal via videoconference of Altman, who had become a kind of global ambassador for artificial intelligence, was strange because of the forms and the lack of a clear explanation. The entire Silicon Valley is wondering what happened.
Altman received a text message Thursday evening in San Francisco. It had been a long and intense day. He had taken part in a panel discussion at the CEO meeting at the Asia Pacific Economic Summit (APEC). Nothing in his intervention could suggest that he is moving away from OpenAI. He argued that artificial intelligence will be “the most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented” and that it will not require strict regulation “for the next two generations.” “I’m very excited. “I can’t think of anything more exciting to work on,” he said.
The text message that Altman received on his cell phone Thursday evening came from Ilya Sutskever, chief scientist at OpenAI. I scheduled him for a video conference at noon on Friday, San Francisco time. Although the company is based in the Microsoft environment, the tool used was not Teams, but Google Meet. The entire OpenAI board was involved, with the exception of its president Greg Brockman. There were Sutskevers; and the three independent directors: Adam D’Angelo, head of Quora, Tasha McCauley, technology entrepreneur and Helen Toner, director of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
The meeting was short. Altman was told he had been fired and that the news would be released immediately, according to Brockman, who noted that the next person to be subpoenaed was himself. Sutskever texted him at 12:19 p.m. San Francisco time (9:19 p.m. on mainland Spain) asking him to call him briefly. At 12:23 p.m. he sent him a link to connect to the video conference, also via Google Meet. At that time, they informed him that he was fired as president and board member, but not as an employee because he was considered essential.
Immediately afterwards, OpenAI posted the announcement of the layoffs on its website. At 12:28 he tweeted it. In less than half an hour and via video call, the board fired two of the founders. The company’s employees knew nothing about it, except for Mira Murati, 34, born in Albania and educated in Canada, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, who had chosen to replace Altman on an interim basis.
The OpenAI statement noted that the council had lost confidence in Altman and that the decision was made “following an advisory review process by the council,” which did not indicate when it began or what the trigger was. The bottom line is that Altman was not always open and truthful in his communications with the board, which prevented him from fulfilling his responsibilities. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” he added.
No explanation was given in the note regarding Brockman’s dismissal as president. Hours after being removed as president, Brockman also submitted his resignation as an employee. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the council did today,” he tweeted. “We are also trying to find out what exactly happened,” he added.
OpenAI has a complex governance structure with a non-profit (and tax-exempt) organization at the helm, OpenAI Inc, founded in 2015 and controlled by the board. Through its subsidiaries, this company controls and owns the majority of OpenAI Global LLC, the company founded in 2019 in which Microsoft has invested as a reference partner, which also has its limited advantages. But the company makes it clear that “the nonprofit’s primary beneficiary is humanity, not OpenAI investors.”
The statement also refers to these principles, and since Altman’s dismissal coincided with the search for investors for the company with a valuation of almost $90 billion, there is speculation that a conflict may have arisen as a result. The economic derivative could also be a sign of a hidden cultural struggle, between those who favor accelerating the development of artificial intelligence and those who worry about the security implications at every step.
The technology giant led by Satya Nadella was also surprised by Altman’s dismissal. A few weeks ago they took part in the first OpenAI developer conference together.
The employees also did not see what was happening and, according to local media, some interpreted it as a blow. The council meeting reached the decision made and it is not clear why Brockman did not attend that meeting. In the end, it was the chief scientist who took the helm with the support of the independents, which some OpenAI employees didn’t like.
According to The Information, a wave of resignations has begun. Jakub Pahocki, the company’s research director; Aleksander Madry, head of a team that assessed the potential risks of AI, and Szymon Sidor, a researcher at the company since almost its founding, have announced their resignations in protest over Altman’s firing. The question is whether the drain of talent could jeopardize OpenAI’s progress.
At the same time, in addition to the mystery surrounding the trigger for Altman’s sudden dismissal, there is also the question of what one of the best-connected people in Silicon Valley will do now. “I’ll have more to say about what comes later,” he simply tweeted after his release.
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