Sam Altman was fired as CEO of OpenAI on Friday, according to an announcement from the company.
In a statement released by OpenAI, the company states that the move comes after a “deliberative review process by the board,” which allegedly found that Altman was not being “consistently candid” in his communications with them. As a result, the board said it no longer has confidence in the former CEO moving forward.
Why was Sam Altman fired?
“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,” reads the full statement.
Following the move, OpenAI announced that Mira Murati, the CTO of the company, would be stepping in as interim CEO.
The move comes as a bit of a surprise, as Altman had been seen as one of the larger faces of OpenAI. Under Altman’s reign as CEO, the company released the incredibly popular ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) chatbot in 2022, which saw the company rise in popularity immediately.
Altman was one of the initial board members of OpenAI when the company was founded in 2015 alongside Elon Musk and was one of its initial funders, including Greg Brockman (who is also stepping down from the company, per OpenAI), Musk, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, and YC Research.
According to Microsoft in a statement to The Verge, the company will continue to partner with OpenAI. “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,” said Microsoft spokesperson Frank Shaw.
