Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this article:
- The showdown at OpenAI that resulted in Sam Altman’s temporary removal as CEO is being made into a movie.
- Altman’s dismissal in November 2023 was sudden and led to five days of chaos at the artificial intelligence giant.
- The reasons behind Altman’s firing and rehiring boil down to safety concerns and the threat of a mass employee exodus.
In just five days, Sam Altman was ousted as the CEO of OpenAI, condemned with vague talking points, rallied behind by his former employees, and ultimately reinstated by a newly rebuilt board. That return was facilitated, in part, by publicly stated sentiments of regret by the very man behind Altman’s original ouster, Ilya Sutskever.
It’s a dramatic story, as if Julius Caesar had survived his stabbing and rallied the Romans to retake the title of dictator perpetuo with support from Cassius himself. That’s why Challengers-director Luca Guadagnino has set to work on an upcoming movie adaptation of the saga called Artificial. The project was fast-tracked by Amazon MGM Studios and is set to star Andrew Garfield as Altman, Monica Barbaro as OpenAI’s chief technology officer Mira Murati, and Anora breakout star Yura Borisov as Ilya Sutskever.
More than just a managerial shake-up, the 2023 firing and rehiring saga represented an ideological conflict at the core of the debate around artificial intelligence and just who gets to decide the future of technological progress.
So, just what went down across those five days?
On November 17, 2023, OpenAI’s board made the announcement that they had fired the company’s CEO, Sam Altman.
Boards ousting a CEO occasionally happens in the business world. Roughly a year earlier, in November 2022, the Walt Disney Company made waves in the entertainment world when their board abruptly announced the dismissal of then-CEO Bob Chapek in favor of his predecessor, Bob Iger. But while the Chapek ouster hadn’t been overtly telegraphed in the days leading up to it (in fact, Chapek had been set to address a livestreamed Elton John concert that very evening), speculators had smelled blood in the water after a poorly-received earnings call.
But in the case of Altman’s removal that Friday, there was no obvious financial missteps to point to. If anything, OpenAI was having a banner period, with ChatGPT gaining more and more users as well as more and more businesses relying on their software. The reasoning the board provided was, instead, obtuse; they said that they had “concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
This dust-up drew attention to the unique power structure of OpenAI, one that sets it apart from the bulk of other operators in the tech sector. Technology reporter Kate Clark summarized the structure in an NPR interview, noting that rather than being a pure for-profit business from the top down:
“Basically, OpenAI is run by a nonprofit. That nonprofit has a for-profit subsidiary. That subsidiary has raised more than $10 billion from investors, mostly from Microsoft, but as well as venture capital firms like Sequoia Capital. They actually cap the profits that investors can get from the company. This is all part of ensuring that they’re not prioritizing profits and that they’re prioritizing safety. That is why you have a board that does not have equity shareholders like you would typically see.”
That “prioritizing safety” element is what brought Altman into conflict with Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist. Both men had helped found the pioneering technology startup in 2015 and, whether it was due to time or the nature of their positions, found themselves in opposition. Per a report in The New York Times during the five-day showdown, “Sutskever wants the company to prioritize safety and was worried that Altman was more focused on growth.” Sutskever effectively represented a portion of the population within, and outside of, the AI tech space: people who have reservations about the ethical implications of AI, particularly the ways AI can do damage, either in the present (to people who could be defrauded or otherwise deceived by it) or in the future (when a more advanced AI could pose a threat to human survival itself).
Clark, the tech journalist, described Sutskever as the leader of “a camp within OpenAI that felt the company was developing the technology too quickly and not safely enough,” and when Sutskever presented his concerns to the board, they evidently agreed. Firing Altman sent shockwaves through the company.
But perhaps unexpected by the board, it also sent shockwaves through the business world at large. A number of companies rely on OpenAI’s software, and Microsoft had invested a significant amount of money into OpenAI. Meanwhile, other tech businesses were desperate to develop their own competitors to ChatGPT. Altman’s dismissal, and the vagueness of its reasoning, didn’t project stability to outside observers. It made investors worried, and competitors ready to pounce.
Chief technology officer Mira Murati was appointed interim CEO, but as the business world fretted, behind the scenes, employees at OpenAI were near revolt. Several, including senior researchers Jakub Pachocki and Aleksander Madry, resigned in protest.
By Saturday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella weighed in, expressing a desire for resolution, and internally, Murati began advocating for Altman’s return. Reports surfaced of attempts to court Altman back to OpenAI, but by Sunday, those talks reportedly fell apart over conflicts about how the board should be restructured in the event of Altman’s return.
After talks collapsed, the OpenAI board announced they had appointed a new interim CEO, former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear, to replace Murati. But that’s when Microsoft announced that they had hired both Altman and former OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a “new advanced AI research team.” Meanwhile, the dissension brewing within the ranks at OpenAI burst out in an employee letter delivered to the board Monday, with the signers threatening to quit if Altman wasn’t reinstated.
Among the 702 signatures on the letter were Mira Murati and, most shockingly, Ilya Sutskever, the very man behind the ouster in the first place. Sutskever, per Clark, “now wanted to reunite the company, of course, because he wants the company not to fall apart.”
After two days of deliberation, on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman would return as CEO, while Brockman would return as president. A new, larger board was ultimately formed (Adam D’Angelo was the only member carried over from the previous board), one with the ostensible purpose of supporting Altman while also providing a check on any impulses that might truly go against the company’s safety-oriented ethos.
Things seemed to stabilize in the world of OpenAI, at least from the outside.
Less than a year after the dramatic events of November 2023, on May 14, 2024, Ilya Sutskever announced he was leaving OpenAI.
In a post on X (previously Twitter), Sutskever expressed confidence that “OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of...” and then tagged the social media handles for four high-ranking figures at OpenAI.
The first person he tagged in the post was Sam Altman.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
