Sam Altman: a sacking that stunned Silicon Valley
Sam Altman was fired after he was invited to a surprise video board meeting shortly after midday on Friday
DAVID PAUL MORRIS/BLOOMBERG /GETTY IMAGES
Could it be misinformation generated by artificial intelligence? No. It was very real.
Friday’s news that Sam Altman, a star of the tech world, had been fired by OpenAI, one of the world’s hottest companies, stunned Silicon Valley and beyond.
No-one saw it coming. Not least Altman, who had run the company he co-founded since 2019.
Only a week before, in his usual upbeat way, he had hosted the company’s first open day for developers at which he unveiled a slew of announcements, including a new strategy that enabled people to build their own customised chatbots using natural language instead of code.
Now, the company said that he had to go for the opaque reason that “he was not consistently candid in his communications
