What Sam Altman’s Surprise Sacking Means For The AI Race -- The Economist

Sam Altman.TechCrunch Disrupt San Francisco 2019 CC BY 2.0It is a big setback for OpenAI, and could slow the industry as a whole

The immediate effect is chaos

Nov. 18, 2023 (The Economist) -- How quickly the mighty fall.

Ever since the release of Chatgpt a year ago, Sam Altman has been the human face of the generative artificial-intelligence revolution. As recently as November 16th the co-founder and boss of Openai was touting the virtues of ai to executives and world leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in San Francisco.

The very next day he was out on his ear. A blog post on Openai’s website said the board “no longer has confidence” in Mr. Altman’s leadership because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.”

Another shock came hours later. Greg Brockman, chairman of the firm’s board and another co-founder, resigned in response to Mr Altman’s sacking.

The defenestration was all the more surprising because Mr Altman seemed at the peak of his powers.

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