Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.
“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 company said in its blog post. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO, effective immediately. The company will be conducting a search for a permanent CEO successor. When contacted by The Verge, OpenAI’s communications department declined to comment beyond the blog post. Employees at OpenAI found out about the news when it was announced publicly, according to multiple sources.
This is an extremely sudden turn of events. Altman has been the face of OpenAI, which kick-started the current AI arms race with last year’s hugely popular release of ChatGPT. Just last week, Altman led the keynote at the company’s first-ever DevDay conference, where it announced a suite of major new updates to compete with other big tech companies like Microsoft and Google. More recently, Altman spoke at Thursday’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference.
“I loved my time at OpenAI,” Altman said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
Founded as a non-profit in 2015, OpenAI has risen to prominence since ChatGPT was made available to the public a year ago. The chatbot now boasts more than 100 million weekly users, Altman announced earlier this month.
Meanwhile, the company has grown dramatically. As of October, OpenAI was set to bring in more than $1 billion in revenue over a year-long period through the sale of its artificial intelligence products, The Information reported.
In January, Microsoft announced it was investing $10 billion in OpenAI. The move deepened a longstanding relationship between Microsoft and OpenAI, which began with a $1 billion investment four years ago. Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, offers users access to ChatGPT.
Why was Sam Altman fired?
the company said in its blog post as follows “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
Who is the CEO of OpenAI?
Mira Murati, 34, has been elevated to the position of interim CEO of OpenAI recently. Born in 1988 in Albania, Murati is a mechanical engineer.