This is one of the most unexpected announcements in Silicon Valley history. To try to reflect the feeling of surprise felt, certain tech connoisseurs summoned, Friday on . On Friday, November 17, OpenAI’s board of directors dismissed Sam Altman, its CEO and co-founder. Almost a year to the day after the successful launch of the ChatGPT conversational robot, which revived interest in artificial intelligence, the boss of the most prominent start-up in the sector was pushed out. This sidelining is the result of an internal coup which finds its reasons in differences over OpenAI’s strategy, geared, in the eyes of some of its colleagues, towards too rapid and reckless commercial development. The change of leadership also reflects the ambiguity of the OpenAI project, with its atypical structure, and of Sam Altman’s speech, which promises to be already ready to bounce back.
One thing is certain: there was no external warning sign announcing OpenAI’s press release proclaiming “a leadership transition” in the name of the fact that “the board of directors no longer has confidence in Sam Altman’s ability to lead the structure”. Friday morning, the CEO was still sending professional emails, Bloomberg reports. The day before, he was one of the VIPs invited to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in San Francisco, and had participated in a meeting with Microsoft, the partner and major investor in OpenAI. According to several American media, the Seattle giant was also unaware of the upcoming change. The week before, Sam Altman was on stage presenting new features for OpenAI’s first developer day. And, at the beginning of November, he rubbed shoulders with all the elite of the sector and an audience of statesmen and women from twenty-eight countries for the first summit on the risks of artificial intelligence, in the United Kingdom.
According to Greg Brockman, who was chairman of the board but announced his departure due to the exclusion of Sam Altman, the release was the result of an internal coup. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the council has done”he wrote on with the council, during which his ouster was notified to him.
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