The board of OpenAI, the well-known AI startup behind the popular chatbot ChatGPT, abruptly and openly fired CEO Sam Altman on Friday. A day earlier, on Thursday, he had made a public appearance at the APEC CEO Summit on behalf of his company.
Altman “was not consistently forthright in his discussions with the board, impeding its capacity to execute its obligations,” according to the OpenAI board, which added that it carried out “a thorough review process.”
In its statement, the board said that they were “no longer confident in his abilities to continue leading OpenAI.”
OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman, who also served as the board chairman, was one of the six members of the organization’s board as of this past week. The other members were head scientist Ilya Sutskever, Adam D’Angelo, Tasha McCauley, Helen Toner, and Altman. Following the resignations of Neuralink director Shivon Zilis, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, and former Texas congressman Will Hurd, the business started making the list of board members available to the public on its website in July.
The board that oversaw the contentious reorganisation is summarised as follows:
Greg Brockman, a co-founder of OpenAI, openly expressed his amazement and sadness over the board’s decision to remove Altman on Friday by resigning from his position. Before helping to establish OpenAI, Brockman served as CTO of Stripe for five years. According to Brockman (2020), the main challenge faced by OpenAI during its initial five years of operation was the belief that disclosing all of the startup’s research to the public wouldn’t necessarily be in the best interests of humanity. “We realised that when these things get powerful, they’re dual-use [and that] as technology creators, we have a responsibility to not just say, ‘Hey, we made this thing, it’s up to the world to decide how to use it,'” he said at the time.
Source (CNBC)
