By Samantha Kelly | CNN
OpenAI, the organization behind the viral chatbot ChatGPT, announced on Friday its CEO and founder, Sam Altman, was fired and will be departing the company, effective immediately.
The company, in a statement, said an internal investigation found that Altman was not always truthful with the board.
“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 company said in its statement. “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.
The news follows OpenAI’s first developer conference held in San Francisco last week, where Altman served as the master of ceremonies, unveiling a series of new artificial intelligence tool updates, including the ability for developers to create custom versions of ChatGPT. He also shared about 2 million developers now use the platform, and about 90% of Fortune 500 companies are using the tools internally. It currently has 100 million active users.
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.
“Is [AI] gonna be like the printing press that diffused knowledge, power, and learning widely across the landscape that empowered ordinary, everyday individuals that led to greater flourishing, that led above all to greater liberty?” he said. “Or is it gonna be more like the atom bomb – huge technological breakthrough, but the consequences (severe, terrible) continue to haunt us to this day?”
