An excerpt from the upcoming 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 back in 2023.
Written by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the book claims the nonprofit’s board members became increasingly concerned after learning about issues such as an OpenAI Startup Fund that was actually personally owned by Altman.
At the same time, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati were reportedly collecting evidence of what they saw as Altman’s toxic and dishonest behavior, complete with screenshots from Murati’s Slack channel. For example, Altman allegedly claimed the company’s legal department said GPT-4 Turbo didn’t need to be reviewed by the joint safety board, but the company’s top lawyer denied saying that.
After Sutskever provided this evidence to board members, they moved to oust Altman and appoint Murati as interim CEO. But this quickly backfired, with OpenAI employees (including Sutskever and Murati) signing a letter demanding Altman’s return — which he soon did, with Sutskever and Murati subsequently leaving to launch startups of their own.
