In the still young AI industry, OpenAI boss Sam Altman has lost his job. With ChatGPT, OpenAI and Altman triggered the hype about artificial intelligence. What led to the break initially remained unclear.
The development company behind ChatGPT has separated from its co-founder and boss Sam Altman. OpenAI’s board of directors concluded after an audit that Altman was “not consistently honest” in his communications with the board, it said in a statement on Friday.
There is therefore no longer any confidence in his ability to continue to manage OpenAI. Altman was the public face of OpenAI – and, more broadly, the boom in artificial intelligence. Technology boss Mira Murati will temporarily take over the top position while the permanent successor is to be arranged, it said.
OpenAI’s press department initially left an inquiry about the background to the withdrawal of trust in the previous boss unanswered. The statement said only that his conduct hindered the board’s ability to carry out its duties.
“World changed forever”
Altman was in the spotlight until the end: On Thursday, Altman took part in a meeting of top managers as part of the summit of heads of state and government of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based.
While there was speculation about the reasons for his expulsion, he simply wrote in a short statement on the online platform X that he would provide information about his plans for the future later. Altman received glowing encouragement from former Google boss Eric Schmidt. For him, Altman is a hero who has changed our world forever, wrote Schmidt at X. He can’t wait to see what Altman does next – and billions of people will benefit from it.
Lucrative pioneering role for OpenAI
In 2015, Altman was involved in founding OpenAI, which was launched as a non-profit research laboratory for artificial intelligence. The chatbot ChatGPT can formulate sentences at the linguistic level of a human. Its publication around a year ago sparked a hype about artificial intelligence. OpenAI has thus become a pioneer in the technology.
Microsoft entered into a multi-billion dollar pact with the company to bring its technology into the company’s products. Other tech heavyweights such as Google, Amazon and the Facebook group Meta presented competing software for ChatGPT.
The pioneering role is lucrative for OpenAI: According to media reports, a total valuation of $86 billion was assumed for the sale of employee shares. This means that OpenAI has joined the ranks of the most valuable companies not listed on the stock exchange – alongside the video service TikTok and Elon Musk’s space company SpaceX.