Sam Altman always insisted that he wasn't the most important person at OpenAI despite being its CEO. As he traveled the world this year meeting world leaders--the world's unofficial ambassador of AI--Altman would soft-pedal his role, even as he stole glances at his phone to keep up with what was happening in OpenAI's luxe San Francisco offices. "We have an incredibly great team here that can do a lot of things, so mostly, I defer to them," he told me in May when I asked him how the company ran in his absence. "But some things only a CEO can do--some HR thing of the moment, or you have to kill some project, or something with a major partner." Those items would accumulate on his phone and at the end of the day he'd bat out responses. Then he would go back to speechifying, meeting developers, and taking tea with prime ministers.

An internal memo sent to OpenAI staff on Saturday after former CEO Sam Altman's abrupt firing reiterates that "a breakdown in communication" led to the decision, not "malfeasance or anything related to our financial, business, safety, or security/privacy practices," according to Axios and The New York Times. The memo obtained by both publications was sent to employees by OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap. Speculation has been nonstop since Altman was ousted unexpectedly as CEO on Friday and dropped from the company's board of directors, with little concrete information from OpenAI itself to go on. In its announcement of the decision, the board said only that he was not "consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." The board named Mira Murati, OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer, as interim CEO. In response, OpenAI's now-former president, Greg Brockman, announced he was stepping down too, tweeting, "Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today."

Last month, I interviewed Sam Altman and Mira Murati of OpenAI. Now she is taking over his job. The ouster of OpenAI's Altman, one of tech's most visible chief executives, shocked the business and tech world on Friday. It also put the company's chief technology officer, Murati, in charge of tech's biggest and most daunting job: leading the AI pioneer without disrupting life as we know it.

The crisis at artificial intelligence firm OpenAI deepened this weekend amid a reported exodus of senior staff in the wake of boss Sam Altman's mystery firing. OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, abruptly ousted Altman on Friday for allegedly misleading the board. In a statement, it said it had lost confidence in its 38-year-old co-founder after "a deliberative review process" concluded he had not been "consistently candid in his communications", without specifying how. Shortly afterwards, Greg Brockman, the company's president, announced he had resigned. "Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today… We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened," he wrote on X.

More details of Sam Altman's sudden ousting as CEO of OpenAI have emerged, with several senior researchers quitting the company, and executives and investors from across the industry expressing shock and confusion at what is increasingly being perceived as a board coup. Hours after Sam Altman was booted from the company by its board, Greg Brockman, another OpenAI cofounder and the company's chairman, quit in protest. Brockman later posted details of Altman's removal suggesting that the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, had orchestrated the effort to remove the CEO. Brockman's post claimed that Altman was told he was being fired by Sutskever, the company's chief scientist and a member of its board. Several accounts from inside the company suggest that a disagreement between Sutskever and Altman centered around the company's direction, and specifically its ability to build more capable AI technology safety.

This article is from Big Technology, a newsletter by Alex Kantrowitz. For years, Google dominated search with little opposition. The format faced little disruption; it was always just a bunch of blue links. And the company's multibillion-dollar deals with phone-makers to keep Google search as a default cemented its lead. But its comfortable perch is actually, really starting to fade.

Sam Altman, one of the biggest names in tech, was sacked from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI without warning.

OpenAI's firing of Sam Altman followed wide-ranging disagreements between the chief executive officer and his board -- in particular Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and the company's chief scientist -- according to a person familiar with the matter. The debates included differences of opinion on AI safety, the speed of development of the technology and the commercialization of the company, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Altman's ambitions may have also played a role in the divorce. Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp., according to a person with knowledge of the investment proposal. Altman was also courting SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new company to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive.

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were "shocked and saddened by what the board did" and are still trying to figure out what exactly happened. The former CEO and the former President of OpenAI have published a post on X, sharing the details of what they do know and how they found out the former was being fired. Apparently, company co-founder Ilya Sutskever invited Altman for a meeting at noon on Friday, which was then attended by the whole board except for Brockman. It was at that meeting that Altman found out he was being fired and that OpenAI was going to announce it "very soon." Shortly after that, Sutskever reportedly invited Brockman to a separate Google Meet conference, where he was told that Altman had gotten fired and that he was being removed from the board.

Earlier this year, I asked Sam Altman whether decisions made by OpenAI's leaders might one day lead to unemployment among the masses. "Jobs are definitely going to go away, full stop," he told me. He couldn't have known then that his would be among the first. In a blog post released this afternoon, OpenAI--the artificial-intelligence juggernaut for which Altman was the CEO--announced that he would be leaving, effective immediately, because, according to the statement, "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board." The statement did not specify the nature of Altman's alleged misrepresentations, but they must have concerned serious matters to merit such a dramatic and public rebuke.