Five days of chaos: What just happened at OpenAI?

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman is back to work after a brief spell of unemployment. On Friday, the company published a blog titled “OpenAI announces leadership transition,” in which it said Altman would be leaving after “a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications.” The board — which then included Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; Adam D’Angelo, chief executive of the Q&A platform Quora; Tasha McCauley, a tech executive; and Helen Toner, a director at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology — no longer had “confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” they wrote. But details about what exactly Altman — one of the biggest names in the booming AI sector, and a fixture of the San Francisco Bay Area’s startup ecosystem — did wrong have been scarce, prompting some to criticize OpenAI’s board for creating an information vacuum. Shear said that he would commission an investigation into Altman’s ouster but that it was not prompted by a “specific disagreement on safety.” Nevertheless, many have speculated that the issue was a dispute over how quickly — and safely — the company should be moving to develop increasingly powerful AI software. The drama at one point knocked $48 billion off Microsoft’s valuation, and briefly incited a scramble by competing AI firms to hire away Altman loyalists.