“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the company said in its blog post. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
Chief technology officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO. The company will be conducting a search for the permanent CEO successor. A spokesperson for OpenAI didn’t immediately return The Verge’s call for comment.
This is an extremely sudden turn of events. Just last week, Altman keynoted at the company’s DevDay conference, where it announced a suite of major new updates to compete with other big tech companies like Microsoft and Google. OpenAI arguably kickstarted the current AI arms race with last year’s hugely-popular ChatGPT.
Altman was a co-founder of OpenAI and initially served as a co-chair of the company alongside Elon Musk. Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla.
