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New details are emerging about the dramatic resignation of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, after the company’s president resigned in protest at the board’s shocking decision.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman left the company almost immediately after the company’s board fired Altman on Friday, following a reported dispute over the security of powerful AI systems like ChatGPT.
The company’s chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who is also a board member, led the shocking coup against Altman with the support of three independent board members.
According to Brockman, Sutskever fired Altman in a video chat at noon on Friday, and a few minutes later told Brockman he would be removed as chairman of the board, but asked him to remain as president and report to new interim CEO Mira Murati.
Brockman declined the offer to remain at OpenAI as president and sent a company-wide message saying, “based on today’s news, I have resigned.”
OpenAI president Greg Brockman (above) left the company almost immediately after the company’s board fired CEO Sam Altman on Friday
Microsoft-backed OpenAI publicly released its ChatGPT chatbot in late 2022. It uses generative AI, meaning it can learn from past data to create human-like creative content, including text, images and computer code.
News of Altman’s firing surprised employees at Silicon Valley and OpenAI, as the 38-year-old was hailed as a pioneer and one of the leading figures in the high-stakes world of AI.
But his ouster appears to be the result of a simmering feud with Sutskever the safety of AI, the speed at which the technology developed and the commercialization of the company, said Bloomberg.
In a post on
When Altman joined Google Meet at noon he was surprised to see that the rest of the board, except Brockman, had also joined.
Sutskever then told Altman that he had been fired and that the news would come out “very soon.”
Within an hour, OpenAI issued an unusually blunt and harsh statement in which the board concluded that Altman “was not consistently forthcoming in his communications with the board, which hampered the board’s ability to discharge its responsibilities.”
“The board no longer has confidence in its ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” the statement added.
OpenAI’s chief scientist Ilya Sutskever (above), who is also a board member, led the shocking coup against Altman with the support of three independent board members
Sam Altman, 38, became a tech world sensation with the release of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot with unprecedented capabilities
Brockman says he received a text from Sutskever at 12:19 p.m. asking him to participate in a “quick call.”
Minutes later, on a Google Meet, Sutskever told Brockman about Altman’s resignation and said Brockman could remain as president, but not as a member of the board, which Brockman had chaired.
Brockman said OpenAI’s management team was not informed of the move in advance, apart from interim CEO Murati, who was informed the night before.
The departure blindsided many employees who discovered the abrupt change in management through an internal post and the company’s public blog.
“We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened,” Brockman posted on X, formerly Twitter, adding, “We will be fine. Bigger things are coming soon.”
Altman acknowledged his resignation in several posts on
Altman has no equity stake in the company, having previously said he believes AI development should not be primarily motivated by profit.
In addition to Sutskever, OpenAI’s now four-person board consists of three independent directors, who do not work at the company and have no equity interest.
They are Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.
Sutskever, who engineered Altman’s removal, is also a co-founder of OpenAI, although he has maintained a much lower public profile than Brockman or Altman, who have been in the public eye in recent weeks for talking about ChatGPT.
Mira Murati was Altman’s top lieutenant and will replace him as interim CEO. The two are seen together above earlier this month
According to his LinkedIn profile, Sutskever has degrees from the Open University of Israel and the University of Toronto.
He previously co-founded DNN Research, a deep learning startup that was acquired by Google in 2013.
Sutskever is one of the co-founders of OpenAI, which originally launched in 2015 as a nonprofit with $1 billion in funding from a consortium of engineers including Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel.
“We believe that AI should be an extension of individual human will and, in the spirit of freedom, should be as broadly and evenly distributed as safely possible,” Sutskever wrote in a statement at the time of the group’s founding.
“The outcome of this undertaking is uncertain and the work is difficult, but we believe the purpose and structure are sound.”
In 2019, OpenAI was restructured to allow it to raise venture funding, and has raised billions from investors including Microsoft.
“Microsoft remains committed to Mira and their team as we bring this next era of AI to our customers,” a spokesperson for the software maker told Reuters on Friday.
Sutskever’s most recent post on