Sam Altman, the Silicon Valley CEO behind the artificial intelligence-powered chatbots ChatGPT and GPT-4, has been sacked by the company’s board of directors which said it has lost confidence in him.
Announcing the sack which has sent stunning shockwaves through the budding AI industry, the board said an internal investigation found that Altman was not always truthful.
The statement read; “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 continue leading OpenAI.”
OpenAI announced Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO until a permanent successor is chosen.
ChatGPT launched late last year, making Altman an overnight quasi-celebrity and the face of a new crop of AI tools that can generate images and texts in response to simple user prompts. The technology is called generative AI and has since been deployed by Microsoft on its search engine and other tools. Google has a rival called “Bard,” and other generative AI tools have been developed in recent months.
Not long after its release, ChatGPT became a household name almost synonymous with AI itself. CEOs used it to draft emails, people-built websites with no prior coding experience, and it passed exams from law and business schools.
Although Altman has long been an advocate of AI, he is also one of its biggest critics. In testimony before Congress earlier this year, Altman described the technology’s current boom as a pivotal moment.
