In a weekend filled with more twists and turns than Succession, the saga of Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI unfolded like a rather dramatic and often ridiculous soap opera for the tech world. On Friday, Ilya Sutskever, a cofounder and board member of OpenAI, in a move reminiscent of a high-stakes thriller, informed Altman, the company’s CEO, that he was fired. Altman was told he was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the board of directors and that they had lost confidence in his ability to run the company. In the tech world, this set off so many rumors it was hard to keep track.
By Saturday morning, after sifting through all the speculation, it became clear that Altman was likely pushed out, according to two people I spoke to close to the board, and reporting from other outlets, including The New York Times, because of safety concerns around the speed with which he was ushering the company into the AI future, and, what some feared was potentially an AI apocalypse. The board, after all, was not set up to pursue profits for OpenAI, but rather, to ensure the company didn’t destroy humanity. However, the drama didn’t end there. For a few hours, Altman and another cofounder Greg Brockman, who quit as president after Altman was fired, were in talks with venture firms to start a new AI company. Then the news shifted, to note that Altman was in talks to return to OpenAI as CEO. Then the board was called on to resign. Then the board wasn’t going to resign. Then Altman was not coming back as CEO. And in a final twist, Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch, was appointed as interim CEO of OpenAI, and Altman is going off to Microsoft to run a new AI division—or, maybe returning to OpenAI?
For those of you following along at home who lost the plot of this bizarre story, I asked ChatGPT to summarize this into a haiku. “AI drama unfolds. CEO’s swift exit. Tech soap opera.” (Though, it should be noted, that ChatGPT still can’t accurately write a haiku, which should be 5, 7, and 5 syllables. This is 6, 6, and 5 syllables.) But beyond the drama and the AI poetry, what happened in Silicon Valley this weekend points to a much bigger problem with Silicon Valley, and the people who continue to populate it, which played out, where else, but on social media, specifically Twitter, or X, or the cesspool of the internet, or whatever it’s called these days.
During the saga, people were constantly tweeting their uninformed viewpoints on what was happening inside the boardroom of OpenAI. The panopticon of Twitter/X was so vividly clear when Altman emerged, tweeting a picture of himself wearing a guest pass at OpenAIs office, and saying: “first and last time I ever wear one of these.” Then an employee posted a picture of Altman tweeting the picture of himself. Reporters were stationed outside the building reporting what kind of food and drink was being delivered to the company’s headquarters (boba tea and McDonald’s in case you were wondering). Other employees were tweeting so many different colored heart emojis at each other that I didn’t actually know they came in that many colors. Through all of this, Silicon Valley mainstays like Marissa Mayer, Vinod Khosla, and Brian Chesky lay tweets at the feet of Altman, praising him like a deity and arguing for the board to reinstate him as the rightful CEO. Then, just when you didn’t think it could get more dramatic, 500 of the 770 employees at OpenAI signed a letter threatening to resign if the board did not quit… but wait… you won’t believe whose name was on the first page: Ilya Sutskever, the board member who fired Altman on Friday. Stutskever tweeted that he regretted his role in the firing. Which Altman retweeted with three heart emojis. (By Monday late-morning over 700 of the 770 OpenAI employees had now signed the open letter threatening to resign—I’m assuming the other 70 hadn’t woken up yet.)
Nick Bilton
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