OpenAI CEO Sam Altman fired, CTO Mira Murati named interim CEO

TechCrunch

On Friday, OpenAI’s board of directors announced a surprise shakeup of its top leadership. CEO Sam Altman was fired and will leave the company and the board immediately. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati will take over as interim CEO.

The board said that Altman’s dismissal was the result of an internal review process that found he had not been honest and transparent in his communications with the board, compromising its ability to oversee the company. Therefore, the board lost trust in his leadership and let him go.

OpenAI, the owner of the popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, expressed gratitude to Altman for his role in founding and growing the company but said that Murati was the best person to lead the company in the interim. 

Murati heads the company’s research, product, and safety functions. The board said it had full confidence in her abilities to steer OpenAI through this transition.

OpenAI’s board consists of the company’s Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Chairman and President Greg Brockman. There are also independent advisors on the board who do not have any stake in the company: Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and privacy advocate Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology. Altman was also an independent advisor on the board, even though he was the company's CEO before his departure.

Altman had become a prominent figure in the generative AI industry as his profile grew along with the rapid rise of AI technologies in the past year. He was the former president of Y Combinator and had appeared before congressional committees, attended Senate AI forums, and participated in many industry conferences.

The suddenness of Friday’s announcement was surprising, given how actively and consistently Altman had been promoting his company and its products in the days before his termination.

Altman and Murati were not the only ones affected by this change. Brockman was also asked to step down from his role as board president, but he refused and quit instead. He wrote to OpenAI employees in a company-wide email on Friday, “based on today’s news, I quit.”

Microsoft, which signed a multibillion-dollar partnership extension with OpenAI in January, saw its stock price drop on Friday afternoon. However, Microsoft said it would continue its partnership with OpenAI, despite the leadership turmoil. A company spokesperson told Engadget via email, “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.” However, according to a report by The Information, few people within Microsoft were informed of Altman’s firing before the public announcement, including teams that were working on products based on OpenAI’s technology.

Microsoft’s position was not surprising, given the reported details of its US$10 billion investment in OpenAI in January, which raised OpenAI’s valuation to US$23 billion. Microsoft will reportedly get a large share of OpenAI’s profits, 75 percent, until its investment is paid back, after which that share will reportedly drop to 49 percent.

Altman co-founded OpenAI with Elon Musk in 2015 as a nonprofit and became the CEO of the for-profit arm in 2019. The launch of the company’s ultra-popular ChatGPT conversational AI in November is credited with sparking the generative AI boom.

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