Turmoil at OpenAI: after firing Sam Altman, what’s next for the home of ChatGPT?

Illustration: The Verge

OpenAI’s board removed CEO Sam Altman, and the former chairman just quit. Now it’s unclear what the future holds for a leader in generative artificial intelligence tools.

On November 17th, OpenAI’s board abruptly announced that co-founder and CEO Sam Altman was out, effective immediately. Without saying it directly, the board revealed Altman was fired after a review “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

What caused the board to lose confidence in his ability to lead OpenAI is unknown. In the preceding days, everyone had continued acting as though everything was normal, with insiders at OpenAI and partners like Microsoft surprised to learn of Altman’s ouster only moments before it was announced.

Within hours, fellow co-founder and former chair Greg Brockman announced that “based on today’s news, I quit.” OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, has been appointed interim CEO for now.

The shakeup comes just shy of one year after the launch of ChatGPT, which quickly entered mainstream conversation, became one of the fastest-growing apps in history, and initiated an industry-wide race to build generative AI tools and hardware to power them. At OpenAI’s first developer conference just a week before his ouster, Altman said the service had over 100 million weekly users, and more than two million developers were building on the company’s APIs.

All of the news and updates about OpenAI’s executive turnover continue below.

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