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Sam Altman fired from OpenAI
- J1 Lee
- Mar 8, 2024
- 2 min read
On November 17, 2023, Sam Altman, one of the co-founders and CEOs of OpenAI, was fired for not being “consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” Unlike those of most big tech firms, OpenAI’s board does not operate on a for-profit basis. OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organization in 2015, but needed more funding for its expensive AI endeavors so it begun to use a capped profit structure in which the company could build capital while maintaining its responsibility to better humanity. However, this lead to a divide in the underlying ethics as relates to the company, as some viewed it as a think tank solving ethics problems and others viewed it as a for-profit company developing commercial products. Altman described these divided groups as ‘tribes’ in a 2019 staff email.
Before OpenAI, Sam Altman was a president at Y combinator which was a startup accelerating firm that helped guide small startups such as Airbnb, Stripe, and Dropbox into commercial successes. His skillset was bringing these small companies to great commercial success and he took this approach into developing ChatGPT. Sam Altman pushed for commercialization after the public release of ChatGPT which became one of the fastest growing apps which proved that it could be very profitable. But Ilya Sutskever, who was the Chief Scientist, pushed for a more ethical and slower paced approach since there were many ethics concerns that arose when millions of people were using ChatGPT. These ethics concerns included abuse by bad actors such as hacking groups using ChatGPT to quickly generate and debug malicious code used for phishing scams. This divide in ideals was what lead to Altman being fired by the board.
When Altman was fired, great strife arose in the company as many employees threatened to leave for Microsoft if Altman was not rehired. Consequently, Altman was reinstated by the company. On March 8, 2024, after a review was conducted, he was set to lead the company again and Sutskever stated on Twitter that he regretted his involvement with the decision to fire Altman. In a review of the board’s action by WilmerHale, a law firm, they came to the conclusion that the board fired Altman to “mitigate internal management challenges and did not anticipate that its actions would destabilize the Company” and came to the conclusion that “the prior Board acted within its broad discretion to terminate Mr. Altman, but also found that his conduct did not mandate removal.”
This major decision has a great impact on the direction of OpenAI and the future of AI as a whole since it means that OpenAI is leaning more and more toward a for-profit model with Altman as CEO. There are many ethical concerns surrounding AI that have not yet been addressed and many unknown consequences of the widespread commercialization of AI. However, these concerns may be less of a priority or ignored to increase profit.
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