More than three days after OpenAI was thrown into chaos by Sam Altman's sudden firing from his post as CEO, one big question remains unanswered: Why? Altman was removed by OpenAI's non-profit board through an unconventional governance structure that as one of the company's cofounders he helped to create. It gave a small group of individuals wholly independent of the ChatGPT maker's core operations the power to dismiss its leadership, in the name of ensuring humanity-first oversight of its AI technology. The board's brief and somewhat cryptic statement announcing Altman's departure said the directors had "concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." Altman was replaced by CTO Mira Murati who was appointed interim CEO. Greg Brockman, like Altman an OpenAI cofounder, was removed from his post as chair of the board and quit the company in solidarity with Altman several hours later. There have been many twists and turns since Friday, with Altman making a failed attempt to return as CEO, the board replacing Murati as interim CEO with Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear, Microsoft announcing it would hire Altman and Brockman, and almost every OpenAI employee threatening to quit unless Altman returned.

In an ABC News interview this week, he warned "there will be other people who don't put some of the safety limits that we put on." OpenAI released its A.I. chatbot ChatGPT to the public in late November, and this week it unveiled a more capable successor called GPT-4. Other companies are racing to offer ChatGPT-like tools, giving OpenAI plenty of competition to worry about, despite the advantage of having Microsoft as a big investor. "It's competitive out there," OpenAI cofounder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever told The Verge in an interview published this week. "GPT-4 is not easy to develop…there are many many companies who want to do the same thing, so from a competitive side, you can see this as a maturation of the field."

Human-like artificial intelligence is still a long way off, but Greg Brockman believes the time to start thinking about its safety is now. That's why, after helping to build the online-payments firm Stripe, he cofounded OpenAI along with Elon Musk and others. The nonprofit research group focuses on making sure AI continues to benefit humanity even as it increases in sophistication. Brockman plays many roles at the firm, from recruiting to helping researchers test new learning algorithms. In the long term, he says, a general AI system will need something akin to a sense of shame to prevent it from misbehaving.