‘He pissed everyone off’: OpenAI board members tell the media why they tried to fire Sam Altman
Top managers complained about toxic behaviour, lies, manipulation, and ‘psychological abuse’ on his part
In November 2023, OpenAI's board of directors announced the dismissal of Sam Altman from the position of CEO and from the board itself. The media described the company's decision as ‘unexpected’. A few days later, Altman was brought back, and the board of directors was renewed.
Six months later, former board member Helen Toner explained why the board took such a step in The TED AI Show podcast.
Source. This was reported by The Verge.
The main reasons are obstruction of the board's work, lies, and toxic behaviour of the entrepreneur.
For example, Altman did not tell that he owned the OpenAI fund to support AI startups. He positioned himself as an ‘independent’ board member without any commercial interests.
Several times, the co-founder provided the board with inaccurate information about the company's security procedures. As a result, observers could not know for sure whether these measures were sufficient and whether there was a need to revise protocols and approaches.
Even the board learned about ChatGPT's exit in 2022 not from the CEO, but from Twitter.
Two top managers complained about Altman, supporting their complaints with screenshots and other documents. They pointed to toxic behaviour, lies, manipulation, and ‘psychological abuse’ on his part.
Managers saw no point in communicating this feedback to him, as he ‘clearly could not and did not want to change’.
Helen Toner also faced attacks. Altman didn't like one of her public studies because OpenAI looked worse than its competitors in it. The company's co-founder tried to turn the rest of the board against Toner to get her removed, she says.
By the autumn of 2023, four board members – Toner, Adam D'Angelo, Tasha McCauley, and Ilya Sutskever – finally realised that they could no longer believe Altman's words. The situation seemed unacceptable. The board should provide independent control, ‘not help the director raise as much money as possible’. That's when they decided to fire him.
According to the newspaper, they had to go behind the co-founder's back. If he had found out about the plans, ‘he would have done everything possible to undermine the board's authority,’ Toner says. That's why only lawyers knew about the decision.
According to Toner, after the dismissal, the staff ‘believed in a false dichotomy: if Altman was not brought back and the board was not dissolved, OpenAI was over.’ For this reason, many rushed to put public pressure on the board, but there were also those who were simply afraid to speak out against the fired CEO because of his vindictiveness.
At the time, 707 of OpenAI's 770 employees threatened to move to Microsoft if the board of directors did not resign.
Toner says this is not the first time Altman has been a problem. She recalled, citing the media, that he was also fired from Y Combinator, allegedly because of his selfish motives. And at Loopt, the startup where he had worked before, he was asked to be removed by the management, complaining about his ‘lying and inconsistency’.
This year's chairman of the OpenAI board, Bret Taylor, reminded that both lawyers and an independent committee had studied the events of November 2023. More than 95% of employees, including top managers, called for Altman's return and the dissolution of the board.
And the decision to fire him turned out to have nothing to do with concerns about security, money, development pace, or statements made to clients, investors, and partners.
After firing Altman, the board first appointed CTO Mira Murati to replace him, but then replaced her with Twitch co-founder Emmett Scheer after investor demands for the co-founder to return. Shear even managed to draw up an action plan for the first 30 days of work.
The company then cited Altman's ‘lack of frankness’ as the reason for his dismissal. At the same time, neither Emmett Shire nor Microsoft, one of the key investors, understood what exactly made the board take this action.
We wrote more about this in Mind's article ‘’He's got delusions of grandeur’. Why the venture capital world is tired of Sam Altman’.
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