Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI who became a global representative of the nascent AI industry, is leaving the company, OpenAI announced in a blog post.
According to the post, Altman was fired after a review process by the company’s board of directors which concluded that “he was not always candid in his communications with the board, which hindered his ability to exercise one’s responsibilities.
“The Board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” the message said.
Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will take over as interim CEO, effective immediately. Murati has been with the company for five years.
“I loved my time at openai. It was transformative for me personally and, hopefully, for the world a bit. Above all, I loved working with such talented people,” Altman wrote in a tweet after his ouster.
“I’ll have more to say about the rest later.”
I loved my stay at Openai. it was transformative for me personally and hopefully for the world a bit. I especially enjoyed working with such talented people.
I will have more to say about the rest later.
????
– Sam Altman (@sama) November 17, 2023
OpenAI’s board of directors is made up of its chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Greg Brockman, the company’s president, was initially expected to step down as chairman of the board while retaining his other position within the company. However, Brockman issued a letter of resignation from the company hours after Altman’s departure was announced.
After learning today’s news, here is the message I sent to the OpenAI team: https://t.co/NMnG16yFmm pic.twitter.com/8x39P0ejOM
-Greg Brockman (@gdb) November 18, 2023
The announcement comes a day after Altman made an appearance in front of CEOs and world leaders at the APEC summit to tout the potential of AI.
Who is Mira Murati?
Mira Murati, 34, was relatively unknown until recently. Born in Albania in 1988, Murati grew up during the Balkan country’s transition from a totalitarian communist system to a more democratic government. She left at 16 to pursue engineering studies in the United States before climbing the ranks of the technology industry.
She joined OpenAI in 2018, where she participated in the development of ChatGPT and the AI image generator DALL-E. Murati began working seriously with technology at Tesla, where she helped create Autopilot, the company’s self-driving assistance software.
In a interview last month with Fortune, she said of her work in AI: “I thought it would definitely be the most important set of technologies that humanity had ever built. So I wanted to be part of it.
As the company’s chief technology officer, she has attracted media attention in recent months due to her stance on AI ethics.
Murati said he believes artificial intelligence can have a positive impact on people’s lives, in areas ranging from climate change to health. She recently joined the board of directors of Unlearn.AIa startup specializing in the development of machine learning methods capable of diagnosing diseases and accelerating their treatment.
“There are…a ton of questions around societal impact, and there are a lot of ethical and philosophical questions that we need to consider,” Murati said. Time earlier this year. “And it’s important that we bring up different voices, like those of philosophers, social scientists, artists and humanities scholars.”
This is a developing story and will be updated.
