On 17th of November, the business world was shocked with absolutely unexpected news: OpenAI board of directors decided to fire Sam Altman, the company’s CEO since 2019. The main argument for firing is the fact that “Sam wasn’t fully transparent with the board, which causes doubts about his ability to rule the company”, official press release says.

The temporary general director will be Mira Mourati, OpenAI’s current technical director. The company seeks for permanent candidates. Today that was said that Emmett Shear, co-founder of Twitch, is going to take her place.

The real reason for firing was explained by numerous experts – most of them point to the conflict between OpenAI’s scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutsveker and Sam Altman. Sutsveker is famous by his caution and attention to safety issues when it comes to AI development, while Altman was focused on increasing company’s revenue by streamlining the development of new products. Sutsveker seems to be main architect of Altman’s firing.

After official message about Altman’s firing, investors of OpenAI tried to press on board to bring Altman back, but Altman refused. To show support, one of board’s members, Greg Brockman also quit his position in OpenAI.

Today, on 20th of November, Altman posted that he is going to join Microsoft in pair with Brockman to lead the new AI investigation program. “Mission continues”, – said Sam laconically.