Details emerge of surprise board coup that ousted CEO Sam Altman at OpenAI

"According to people familiar with the board's thinking, members had grown so untrusting of Altman that they felt it necessary to double-check nearly everything he told them," the WSJ report said. The sources said it wasn't a single incident that led to the firing, "but a consistent, slow erosion of trust over time that made them increasingly uneas... See more

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

Now, Sam is one of those unstoppable forces so he may very well soon enlist other backers and leave but… for now it looks like OpenAI split into two, and Microsoft has managed to seize both halves.

The board likely shares half of the blame, speculates Steve Blank, an adjunct professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford University. “Where were they?” he asks. “It seems like a toxic combination of a board not paying attention and a first-time founder in crisis.”

In the course of a year, the tech industry’s dreary post-social, post-crypto interregnum was rapidly supplanted — largely as the result of public-facing efforts by OpenAI, which is reportedly in talks with Microsoft about a potential $10 billion investment — by a story about inevitable technologies that are  so  transformat

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