Sam Altman firing drama detailed in new book excerpt

An excerpt from the upcoming “The Optimist”: Sam Altman and OpenAI in the Race to Invent the Future. There are new details on why OpenAI’s board briefly dismissed CEO Sam Altman in 2023. The book, written by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Haguey, claims that the board members of the nonprofit became increasingly concerned when they learned about OpenAI Startup Funds owned by Altman personally.

Co-founder Ilya Suksever and CTO Mira Murati reportedly collected screenshots of Murati’s Slack chat channel to show what they believed was Altman’s dishonest and toxic behavior. Altman, for example, allegedly claimed that the company’s legal team said GPT-4 Turbo did not need to be reviewed and approved by the joint safety committee, but the top lawyer of the company denied saying this.

When Sutskever presented this evidence to the board, they decided to remove Altman and appoint Murati to be interim CEO. This quickly backfired when OpenAI employees, including Sutskever, signed a letter demanding Altman return. He did so, and Sutskever, and Murati, left to start their own startups. Subscribe to the latest tech news with