OpenAI said to be in turmoil following the exodus
The crisis at artificial intelligence firm OpenAI deepened this weekend amid a reported exodus of senior staff in the wake of boss Sam Altman’s mystery firing.
OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, abruptly ousted Altman on Friday for allegedly misleading the board. In a statement, it said it had lost confidence in its 38-year-old co-founder after “a deliberative review process” concluded he had not been “consistently candid in his communications”, without specifying how.
Shortly afterwards, Greg Brockman, the company’s president, announced he had resigned. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today… We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened,” he wrote on X.
The departures stunned the tech world and have sent rumours swirling, with some speculating that internal divisions over AI safety could be to blame. On Saturday evening, the reasons for the turmoil remained unclear, but the drama took another twist as three other senior staff members at OpenAI were reported to have left. The Information, a US tech publication, reported that Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research, Aleksander Madry, head of a team evaluating potential risks from AI, and Szymon Sidor, a researcher, had told associates they had resigned.
None of the three could be contacted for comment on Saturday. OpenAI, which is now being led by interim CEO Mira Murati, also did not respond to requests for a comment.
Based in San Francisco, OpenAI was founded in 2015 by Altman, Brockman, Elon Musk and others. Last year, it launched ChatGPT, a text-based AI-powered tool that allows users to enter prompts and receive human-like responses and is now used by millions.
