The short-lived firing of Sam Altman, the CEO of possibly the world’s most important AI company, was sensational. When he was sacked by OpenAI’s board members, some of them believed the stakes could not have been higher – the future of humanity – if the organisation continued under Altman. Imagine Succession, with added apocalypse vibes. In early November 2023, after three weeks of secret calls and varying degrees of paranoia, the OpenAI board agreed: Altman had to go.
The drama didn’t stop there. After his removal, Altman’s most loyal staff resigned, and others signed an open letter calling for his reinstatement. Investors, including its biggest, Microsoft, got spooked. Without talent or funding, OpenAI – which developed ChatGPT and was worth billions – wouldn’t even exist. Some who had been involved in the decision to fire Altman switched sides and within days, he was reinstated. Is he now untouchable? “Certainly he has entrenched his power,” says Karen Hao, the tech journalist whose new book, Empire of AI, details this saga in a tense and absorbing history of OpenAI. The current board is “much more allied with his interests,” she says.
