Sam Altman Fired as OpenAI CEO, Joins Microsoft?

Sam Altman was just fired by the board of directors of OpenAI. Why? What did he do? And why are over 500 employees of OpenAI signing a letter of protest?

Where is Sam Altman going to go next? This is a pretty big deal for tech, for Silicon Valley, for the future of the AI industry. Ryan, have you been following this? Were you tapped in this weekend?

I have. But I think high level. And uh I know you've been assembling the details here, and that's what we're gonna talk about today. So David, give us the details. What happened to Sam Altman, OpenAI? What in the world are they doing over there?

Yeah, end of day Friday, November 17th, the OpenAI Twitter account tweets out OpenAI announces leadership transition.

And everyone knows a leadership transition means somebody got fired. And there's not that many leaders. There's kind of just Sam Altman. So everyone reading this is like, what automatically is like, what the hell is going on? There was an entire blog post that was linked in this tweet. Uh, and it was all the explanation of what's going on and what's happening next. So uh two main quotes from this blog post says the board of directors of OpenAI announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO. Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI, will serve as interim CEO effective immediately. 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 board no longer has confidence in his ability to lead open AI. Pretty big words. And I think when I was reading this, and I think most people across Twitter and across the tech landscape as well, is like, oh my God, what did Sam do?

What was it?

Yeah.

That was my immediate reaction. I was like, okay, he hasn't been candid. This is code for he's lied to us. And in order to get fired from a company for for lying, it can't be like, it seems to me, it can't be a uh especially with somebody with um the the uh I think press of of Sam Altman, it can't be a small lie. It has to be like a pretty big lie. So my initial reaction was, yeah, something really bad just came out of some skeleton that Sam had in the closet just came out and popped its head out. That's uh that was my reading of this. But it seems like maybe we haven't gotten full clarity on what he was not being candid about. And and this is now three days later. Is that the case, David?

Yeah, over the weekend, it was just three, two and a half days of chaos. We do have a lot more clarity as to where this whole mess is going. It was a tumultuous weekend. There was speculation going on left and right. Sam was going to get rehired by the board, but then Sam is now elsewhere at Microsoft now. So let's kind of like run through the details as to what happened this weekend because it was just a peak drama in Silicon Valley. First, after Sam was let go by the board on Friday. Friday evening, not even afternoon, Friday evening, Sam tweets out I loved my time at OpenAI. It was transformative for me personally and hopefully the world a little bit. Most of all, I loved working with such talented people. We'll have more to say about what's next later. Saluti emoji.

So actually like not really any questions being answered here, just under

No, no answer to the why still.

Yeah. So still kind of confused. But this is when we start to get a glimpse of like, okay, there is trouble brewing. There's there's not as all right in OpenAI. And that's when Greg Brockman, who is the uh president of OpenAI and one of its co founders, was also removed from the board

by the board.

Uh and so Sam Altman also was on the board and he is the CEO. And then he was fired. So fired, removed from the board. Greg Brockman, president, was removed from the board, but not fired.

He was just removed.

Well, that's a huge slap in the face, right? Like you're a co founder, you're we're not we're gonna let you have your job, but you're no longer on the board, right? I mean, that would be pretty frustrating, I would imagine.

And it we should probably talk about what is a board and what does it do? So Sam Altman and Greg Brockman are executives. They're making the decisions. They are leading the company. And the board is generally not doing everything, anything at all. They're generally just overseeing governance and high-level direction. And they have the power to remove people, but not make really any um executive decisions. So the board, uh, the governance over OpenAI removes Sam Altman and also removes President Greg Brockman. And so Greg Brockman is retweeting Sam Altman's tweet that he says, I loved my time at OpenAI, basically his farewell tweet from OpenAI. And Greg tweets out um retweeting Sam.

After learning today's news, this is the message I have sent to the OpenAI team. And it's just a screenshot of his like notes app writing in his notes app. He goes, Hi, everyone, I'm super proud of what we've all built together since starting this in my apartment eight years ago. We've been through tough and great times, accomplishing so much despite all the reasons that should have been impossible. But based on today's news,

I quit.

So he just quits on Twitter. I mean, maybe maybe he likes messaged the board, but he basically just res resigns via Twitter. Uh

You know what this reminds me of? Do you remember OG Spider-Man? No man Norman Osborne getting fired from Oscorp. Do you remember that scene?

He's just like, uh, you can't do this to me. Do you know how much I've sacrificed? Yeah.

That's what this reminds me of. Like two of the co-founders basically getting fired. I guess Greg was not fired technically, but like getting pushed out of their own company.

Yeah.

yeah, that's exactly right. Uh and so everyone is realizing okay, number one at number two of OpenAI, perhaps the most important defining company of the modern age are out. One, one fired, one quitting in solidarity. And so everyone is really trying to ask like, what the hell is going on?

And with Greg quitting in solidaire in solidarity with Sam, people have stopped asking the questions, what did Sam do? Like what was he up to? Did he lie? Did he steal? Did he cheat? And now everyone is like, Oh, what what is the board up to? What

So this is the why being revealed. At first, the initial inclination is, oh, Sam must have done something really bad. There's some skeleton in the closet. But then when you have other employees, other co founders also resigning in protest, then you start to think, well, maybe the board was doing something. Maybe, maybe this was a division not based on some sort of issue revolving around Sam uh Sam's character. Maybe this is some kind of a uh a schism around a set of issues or a direction for the company.

So then this brings up the question: who the hell is the board of open AI? Who are these people that made this governance decision to remove the one and two of open AI and cause just a massive amount of chaos in Silicon Valley? Because this isn't, Ryan, just about open AI. This is about open AI and the Cambrian explosion of startups that are built on top of Open AI because this impacts everything downstream. So this is people's jobs, this is people's salaries, this is VC investment. Uh, since so much since OpenAI is a platform, the governance decisions over OpenAI and what the board is up to is impacting an entire industry and really the entire city of San Francisco.

And maybe all of society, right? If if AI is going to be the most transformative technology uh that that we'll see in the decades to come, this has ripple effects for for that. And it affects how maybe nation state geopolitics, like it could affect so much downstream.

Certainly. So this has brought up the question of who is the board of OpenAI. There are now four members. There used to be six. Two of them are recently gone. So four or four are left. Ilya Sutzkever, a co-founder and chief scientist at OpenAI, is one of them. Adam D'Angelo, who is the CEO of Quora and an independent director on the board. It's pretty normal to have independent directors on boards, just like having kind of like one arm of removal. Tasha McCauley, who is a tech entrepreneur that not very many people have too many details about. Like who is she and why is she on the board of directors? Technology entrepreneur is in her bio on like LinkedIn, but no one really knows what that means or like what she was an entrepreneur about. Fun fact, Ryan, she's Joseph Gordon Leavitt's wife.

Ah,

they're rocking the sun.

Right.

Uh and and then last one, Helen Toner, a a member of Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology, also an independent director. So this is your board. These are the people that voted out Sam and then also caused the uh departure of Greg. Uh

One other co founder, and then three independents, it looks like.

Exactly. Yeah. Three independents, one being Joseph Gordon Levitt's wife. So these are the people that we're trying to ask. Like, yo, like, can you explain yourselves? Like, why remove Sam? Because to this day, to this moment, at the time of recording, Monday morning, noon, Eastern time, we have not gotten an explanation other than the Sam is not being appropriately candid with the board, which again leaves a lot to left to be desired. And so this is where we were left all of weekend, all this weekend, just kind of asking what the hell is going on. Sunday afternoon, Sam tweets out this funny picture of him holding up a badge as a visitor badge to open AI.

With the caption first and last, I ever wear one of these. Kind of like a polite, a polite troll. Like Sam's a nice guy. He hasn't, he doesn't cause anyone any, he's not like a bully or anything, but definitely like leaning into some of the drama of just like I'm wearing a visitor's badge to open AI, and it'll be the last time that I wear one of these things. To me, I'm like, uh, is he is he coming back to open AI? Like, are they bringing him back? Like, why, why is why tweet this?

And uh just just to bring this up because I thought this was funny. Someone tweets a photo of him taking the photo.

Just kind of funny.

Behind the influencer.

This is the best part. Wow.

Yeah, I thought it was great.

Someone saw him do this. Okay.

Yeah. The re the uh where I found this photo was actually he just retweeted it, so he thought it was funny too.

And so the rumors, Ryan, start going around on Sunday that the board.

Wants to do an oopsie, a reverse Uno card. And okay, okay, no, we made a mistake. Let's get Sam back.

A nice little takes takes backsee. Like,

Right.

sorry.

So the board instated the CTO, Mira Marathi, as CEO, and so the as an interim CEO.

And Mira was like, okay, well, as CEO, I plan to rehire Sam Altman and also President Greg uh in a capacity that's yet to be uh finalized. And so

But he was CEO, right? So you're gonna rehire him under like working for someone else.

I th well, I think the deal is like Mira, who's now interim CEO, is like, well, the board just effed up. I'm bringing him back. I'm in charge of this company. I'm going to do what's best for this company. What's best for this company is getting Sam back into the company. I'm I'm these are the rumors that are going around Sunday. So then everyone's like, oh, okay, Sam uh was fired, but now he's gonna get rehired inside of like 36 hours. And that's the drama. Um, and again, this is just rumors coming out. Emily Chang put out this tweet that linked to this Bloomberg article that had one important paragraph that started to indicate like why was Sam fired, uh, which says the quote from the article Altman, who spearheaded efforts to transform open AI from a nonprofit into a commercially viable business, clashed with board members who were concerned that he was moving too quickly without sufficient concern to the safety implications of a technology that, left unchecked, could cre uh create content capable of harming the public. So

Ah

This Ryan was our first indication that this is an AI safety issue.

now we are starting to see it. It's actually sort of a a schism around uh belief system, right? Which is like one one of uh let's accelerate, let's move faster into the AI frontier, and the other is like let's slow down, let's be careful, let's let's um you know stalt our progress and make sure it's safe before we uh before we push updates into the world.

So the speculation becomes okay, Sam and Greg, the board members of OpenAI, were the gas pedal part of the board, and the rest of the board were the brakes, were the AI safety people. Um, interestingly, the next decision by the board was to hire as the new CEO, replacing the interim CEO, Cura,

Emmett Shear, as the new CEO of OpenAI,

who is Emmett Shear uh

Wait, wait, wait, wait. So the so just really quick though, the the the previous uh CEO, uh Mira, was only CEO like very temporarily.