Silicon Valley Boardroom Coup Leads to Ouster of an AI Champion
- Safety and commercialization were central to disagreements
- Microsoft CEO was ‘blindsided,’ furious at Altman’s firing
OpenAI, the pioneer of widely used tools that generate specialized digital content from simple prompts, ousted its co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman and lost another senior executive after a series of escalating disagreements over fundamental questions at the heart of artificial intelligence: How to keep the technology safe while also making money from it.
Altman clashed with members of his board, especially Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and the company’s chief scientist, over how quickly to develop what’s known as generative AI, how to commercialize products and the steps needed to lessen their potential harms to the public, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. This person asked not to be identified discussing private information.