By Matt O'Brien

The board of ChatGPT-maker Open AI said Friday it has pushed out its co-founder and CEO Sam Altman after a review found he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board.

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the company said in a statement.

Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, will take over as interim CEO effective immediately, the company said, while it searches for a permanent replacement.

An OpenAI spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on what Altman's alleged lack of candor was about. The statement said his behavior was hindering the board's ability to exercise its responsibilities.

Altman helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit research laboratory in 2015.

In the past year, he was thrust into the global spotlight as the face of OpenAI after ChatGPT exploded into public consciousness. On a world tour earlier this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in London.

Just Thursday, he took part in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based.

He predicted AI will prove to be “the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we’ve had so far.” But he also acknowledged the need for guardrails to protect humanity from the existential threat posed by the quantum leaps being taking by computers.

“I really think the world is going to rise to the occasion and everybody wants to do the right thing,” Altman said.

As part of the transition announced Friday, OpenAI's president and board chairman, Greg Brockman, will be stepping down as chairman of the board but will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. The statement gave no explanation for that change.

The company said its board consists of OpenAI's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, and three non-employees: Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of the Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

OpenAI’s key business partner, Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars into the startup and helped provide the computing power to run its AI systems, said Friday that the transition won’t affect its relationship.

“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,” said an emailed Microsoft statement.

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

Updated November 17, 2023 at 4:46 p.m. ET with additional details.

Share:
More In Business
Klarna shares jump 30% on Wall Street debut
Swedish buy now, pay later company Klarna is making its highly anticipated public debut on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday, the latest in a run of high-profile initial public offerings this year. The offering priced at $40 Tuesday, above the forecasted range of $35 to $37 a share, valuing the company at more than $15 billion. The valuation easily makes Klarna one of the biggest IPOs so far in 2025, which has been one of the busier years for companies going public. Other popular IPOs so far this year include the design software company Figma and Circle Internet Group, which issues the USDC stablecoin..
Musk loses crown as world’s richest to software giant Larry Ellison
Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison wrested the title of the world’s richest man from longtime holder Elon Musk early Wednesday as stock in his software giant rocketed more than a third in a stunning few minutes of trading. That is according to wealth tracker Bloomberg. A college dropout, the 81-year-old Ellison is now worth $393 billion, Bloomberg says, several billion more than Musk, who had been the world’s richest for four years. The switch in the ranking came after a blockbuster earnings report from Oracle. Forbes still has Musk as the richest, however, valuing his private businesses much higher.
Load More