Sam Altman firing drama detailed in new book excerpt

An excerpt from the upcoming e book “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” offers new details about why OpenAI’s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman again in 2023.

Written by Wall Avenue Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the e book claims the nonprofit’s board members turned more and more involved after studying about points comparable to an OpenAI Startup Fund that was truly personally owned by Altman.

On the similar time, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati have been reportedly gathering proof of what they noticed as Altman’s poisonous and dishonest habits, full with screenshots from Murati’s Slack channel. For instance, Altman allegedly claimed the corporate’s authorized division mentioned GPT-4 Turbo didn’t must be reviewed by the joint security board, however the firm’s prime lawyer denied saying that.

After Sutskever offered this proof to board members, they moved to oust Altman and appoint Murati as interim CEO. However this rapidly backfired, with OpenAI staff (together with Sutskever and Murati) signing a letter demanding Altman’s return — which he quickly did, with Sutskever and Murati subsequently leaving to launch startups of their very own.