Sam Altman firing drama detailed in new book excerpt

A sneak peek from the soon-to-be-released book “The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future” reveals fresh insights into the circumstances surrounding CEO Sam Altman’s brief firing by OpenAI’s board in 2023.

Authored by Wall Street Journal journalist Keach Hagey, the book alleges that concerns among the nonprofit’s board members escalated upon discovering issues like Altman’s personal ownership of the OpenAI Startup Fund.

Simultaneously, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati were said to have gathered evidence of what they perceived as Altman’s toxic and deceitful conduct, including screenshots from Murati’s Slack channel. For instance, Altman purportedly stated that the company’s legal department had approved GPT-4 Turbo without review by the joint safety board, a claim refuted by the company’s head attorney.

Following Sutskever’s presentation of this evidence to the board, they made the decision to remove Altman and appoint Murati as interim CEO. However, this move backfired rapidly, as OpenAI employees (including Sutskever and Murati) penned a letter demanding Altman’s reinstatement — which he promptly made, leading to Sutskever and Murati departing to establish their own startups.