Sam Altman, Silicon Valley CEO of the artificial intelligence-powered chatbots ChatGPT and GPT-4, has been removed from his position by the company’s board of directors.
Announcing the firing, which sent shockwaves through the nascent AI industry, the board said that an internal investigation had revealed that Altman had not always been truthful.
The statement reads;
“The Board’s thoughtful review process led to the conclusion that Mr. Altman’s departure was a result of the Board’s failure to be consistently forthright in its communications with the Board, which hindered the Board’s ability to carry out its responsibilities. The Board no longer has confidence in Mr. Altman’s ability to continue to lead OpenAI.”
OpenAI announced that Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO until a permanent successor is found.
ChatGPT was announced late last year, and Altman became a quasi-celebrity overnight, becoming the face of a new AI tool that can generate images and text in response to simple user prompts. The technology is called generative AI, and Microsoft is implementing it in its search engine and other tools. Google has a competitor called Bird, and other generative AI tools have been developed in recent months.
Soon after its release, ChatGPT became synonymous with AI itself: CEOs used it to draft emails, people with no coding experience built websites, and it passed law and business school exams.
Altman has long been an advocate of AI, but also one of its biggest critics. In congressional testimony earlier this year, Altman described the current boom in this technology as a pivotal moment.
