The board of the company behind ChatGPT late on Friday fired OpenAI CEO Sam Altman -- to many, the human face of generative AI -- sending shock waves across the tech industry. OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati will serve as interim CEO, the company said, adding that it will conduct a formal search for a permanent CEO. The announcement blindsided many employees who discovered the abrupt management shuffle from an internal announcement and the company's public facing blog. OpenAI scheduled an emergency all-hands meeting to discuss the news with employees Friday afternoon, a person familiar with the matter said.

Until the dramatic departure of OpenAI's cofounder and CEO Sam Altman Friday, Mira Murati was its chief technology officer--but you could also call her as its minister of truth. In addition to heading the teams that develop tools such as ChatGPT and Dall-E, it's been her job to make sure those products don't mislead people, show bias, or snuff out humanity altogether. This interview was conducted in July 2023 for WIRED's cover story on OpenAI. It is being published today after Sam Altman's sudden departure to provide a glimpse at the thinking of the powerful AI company's new boss. Steven Levy: How did you come to join OpenAI?

It has been three years since the arrival of GPT-3,2 a neural-network-based large language model (LLM) that could generate polished, stylish text with ease. What followed was an intense race among tech giants like Google, OpenAI, and Meta to come up with larger and larger models, often trained using texts appearing anywhere on the Internet. While storming the AI research communities, all these were much outside the scope of usual public discourse. The advancement was evident, shortcomings were subtle. But the most drastic change that ChatGPT brought forth was the sensation among the non-researchers (or researchers far from language technology or artificial intelligence) and ordinary citizens.

OpenAI pushed out co-founder Sam Altman as chief executive officer, saying he wasn't being "consistently candid in his communications" with the artificial-intelligence company's board. The startup said Friday that its board concluded after a review that Altman's actions, which it didn't specify, were "hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." The company's statement, unusually candid for such a situation, said: "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI."

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has announced that CEO and co-founder Sam Altman will immediately leave his role leading the company and step down from its board of directors. Altman was not "consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," leading to the board losing confidence in his ability to lead the company, according to the announcement in a blog post on Nov. 17. Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, the company said in the blog post. The company also announced that Greg Brockman, another OpenAI co-founder and president, would step down from his role as chairman of the board, although he would remain in his role as president, reporting to Murati. The sudden departure comes as a shock to the tech world.

The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,

Sam Altman, the chief executive and co-founder of OpenAI, was ousted for allegedly lying to the board of his company, according to an announcement issued Friday. The board "no longer has confidence in his ability to lead" and said new leadership is "necessary" as the company moves forward, OpenAI said in a statement posted on its website. He is likewise leaving the company's board. 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's statement said. What Altman had allegedly hidden from his company's board was not clear. "I loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit.

Sam Altman, who as CEO of OpenAI gave the world ChatGPT and became one of the most influential people in technology, has departed the company after losing the confidence of its board. A company statement says that a review "concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." Mira Murati, previously OpenAI's chief technology officer, was appointed interim CEO while OpenAI searches for a full-time replacement, the statement says. Altman did not respond to a request for comment. Greg Brockman, who cofounded OpenAI with Altman alongside leading names in AI and technology, including Elon Musk, will also step down from his role as chair of the company's board, the company statement says.

In Silicon Valley, Altman has long been known as a smart investor and supporter of smaller companies, but the rise of OpenAI had catapulted him into the league of tech titans such as Muck, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and even the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. As recently as Thursday, Altman was acting the CEO part, speaking onstage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. Last week, he presented a new road map for OpenAI to big applause from hundreds of developers at the company's first major conference.

In a surprise shakeup of its c-suite Friday, OpenAI's board of directors announced that CEO Sam Altman has been fired and will be leaving both the company and the board, effective immediately. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati has been named interim CEO. Altman's oustering reportedly follows an internal "deliberative review process" which found he had not been "consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," the company announced. As such, "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." OpenAI, which owns popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, thanked Altman' for his "many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," but believes that "as the leader of the company's research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO." The board added it has "the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period."