Why do people think it has to be some single big incident? Sam Altman has been the head of OpenAI for many years now, while the company has been in intense public spotlight only in the recent few months. The dynamic today is very different from 2019 or whenever he was hired. He also doesn't have any voting shares, which means he is entirely at the mercy of the board. It's entirely possible that they simply don't like the direction he has been taking the company in, and today was more of some minor straw that broke the camel's back situation.
The knives out language is very unusual for any CEO dismissal. The urgent timing (they didnt even wait for the closure of markets just 30 min later, causing MSFT to lose billions). Anything less than massive Legal and Financial/regulatory risk or a complete behind the back Deal with someone, would have been handled with much more calm and a much less adversive language. Also Greg Borkman has now resigned after it was annoucned that he would step down as chairman of the board. https://twitter.com/gdb/status/1725667410387378559
I agree with this assessment. I would speculate he did something in the early days to gain access to a bunch of training data under the guise of research ("...after all, we're OPENai") and used that data to fine-tune GPT-3 into chatGPT. Then once the weights were sufficiently good enough, deleted all the data and planned on using the chat interactions w/ the model itself for further refinement. Obviously, just total speculation, but the Cover Your Ass verbage of the board makes me think he did something to put the org in deep shit, legally. OpenAI suspended subscriptions last week and that's usually not something a company does, even if the service is degraded. Warn users, yes, but don't take any more money when you're hemorrhaging cash is off. I won't be surprised if it's a flagrant GDPR violation that carries very heavy fines.
OpenAI suspending subscriptions is especially suspect because they've dynamically altered GPT-4 usage limits many times before to handle increased load, and they didn't touch it at all last week before closing signups entirely.
Who says it was abrupt? They could have been planning this for weeks or months for all we know. In fact waiting till late on a Friday just before a holiday week to release the statement is more of a sign that this was deliberately timed.
A planned departure is practically never effective immediately.
If your goal is not spook investors and the public and raise doubts your company, the narrative is:
"X has decided it is time to step away from the Company, the Board is appointing Y to the position as their successor. X will remain CEO for N period to ensure a smooth transition. X remains committed to the company's mission and will stay on in an advisory role/board seat after the transition. We want to thank X for their contributions to the Company and wish them well in the future."
Even if the goal is to be rid of the person you still have them stay on in a mostly made-up advisory role for a year or so, and then they can quietly quit that.
The usual executive departure I have seen is all sugarcoated. Like XXX is having health problems so step down. Or XXX wants to spend more time with family. Or XXX now has a different interest and is leaving to pursue the new opportunity.
This statement doesn’t rhyme with planned transition at all.
