SAN FRANCISCO, Ca. (AP) – ChatGPT-maker Open AI said Friday it has pushed out its co-founder and CEO Sam Altman after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors.
“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the artificial intelligence company said in a statement.
In the year since Altman catapulted ChatGPT to global fame, he has become Silicon Valley’s sought-after voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence and his sudden and mostly unexplained exit brought uncertainty to the industry’s future.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, will take over as interim CEO effective immediately, the company said, while it searches for a permanent replacement.
OpenAI declined to answer questions on what Altman’s alleged lack of candor was about. The statement said his behavior was hindering the board’s ability to exercise its responsibilities.
Dan Ives, Managing Director and Senior Equity Analyst at Wedbush Securities, said Altman’s removal from OpenAI will have a ripple effect across the industry as well as Wall Street.
“I think ultimately what ends up happening is that you start to have founders and CEO’s that are bigger than the board, bigger than the company. And that’s really what played out here in terms of, with Altman that became the face of AI globally,” said Ives. “There’s right now going to be a lot of ramifications from this, I think, for months and years to come.”
Altman posted Friday on X: “i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later.”
The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP’s text archives.
Altman helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit research laboratory in 2015. But it was ChatGPT’s explosion into public consciousness that thrust Altman into the spotlight as a face of generative AI — technology that can produce novel imagery, passages of text and other media. On a world tour this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in London.
He’s sat with multiple heads of state to discuss AI’s potential and perils. Just Thursday, he took part in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based.
He predicted AI will prove to be “the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we’ve had so far.” He also acknowledged the need for guardrails, calling attention to the existential dangers future AI could pose.
OpenAI’s key business partner, Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars into the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems, said that the transition won’t affect its relationship.
