What Sam Altman's Firing Means for the Future of OpenAI

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.