Step 1: Ditch Altman. Step 2: Merge with Anthropic. Step 3: ??? Step 4: Profit.
It’s been nearly two years since OpenAI’s board of directors (very briefly) fired Sam Altman over a lack of confidence in his abilities at the helm of the company. Thanks to the ongoing feud between Altman, who got his CEO seat back within a matter of days, and OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, we now have some more insight into what led to that short-lived coup attempt. Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI, was recently deposed as part of Musk’s lawsuit against Altman and revealed why he and other members of the board plotted to push out their CEO.
According to the deposition, Sutskever spent more than a year considering the possibility of ousting Altman from his leadership role. That desire eventually manifested in a 52-page memo that Sutskever submitted to independent members of the OpenAI board, in which he described Altman as exhibiting “a consistent pattern of lying, undermining his execs, and pitting his execs against one another.” The former chief scientist who founded the company with Altman also said that, at the time, he believed the appropriate action for the board to take was to terminate Altman.
