'A Total Bombshell': Here's What You Need To Know About Sam Altman's Ouster As OpenAI's CEO
On Friday, the board of directors of the nonprofit organization overseeing AI company OpenAI shocked the tech world by firing CEO Sam Altman and removing president Greg Brockman from the board. Brockman resigned hours later. Forbes senior editor Alex Konrad joins Brittany Lewis on "Forbes Talks" to discuss.
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00:00 Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis with Forbes Breaking News. Joining me now is my colleague,
00:07 Senior Editor Alex Conrad. Alex, thanks for coming on in.
00:11 Thanks for having me.
00:13 Of course. And you have been busy all weekend with the tumultuous news in tech. OpenAI CEO
00:20 Sam Altman was fired. Can you give us the highlight reel? What the heck happened?
00:26 It was a total bombshell on Friday afternoon. The board of OpenAI, which is one of the biggest
00:32 and most famous tech companies, especially in the AI world, announced that they had fired
00:38 Sam Altman, their CEO. Total shock. And then very quickly, the president and co-founder
00:44 of the company, Greg Brockman, also resigned. And then this whole weekend has been chaos
00:50 with a push by some people to bring Sam Altman back, which we found out overnight in the
00:55 wee hours of the morning. It's not happening with a new CEO and Sam Altman joining Microsoft.
01:01 Just crazy roller coaster in the tech world.
01:04 I want to talk about the timing of this news first. I cover mostly politics and I know
01:10 a Friday news dump when I see one. This is what that looks like. It was an afternoon.
01:15 And normally, if someone's leaving administration, if someone wants to get some news out that
01:19 might be get unsavory headlines, they dump it Friday afternoon, hoping the weekend buries
01:24 it. Is that what happened here?
01:26 This was for the tech world, the Super Bowl of Friday news dumps. It was crazy. You know,
01:32 it was after the market closed and Microsoft is a big player in all of this. So maybe there
01:38 was that was partially the consideration. Maybe it was to bury the news. But it's absolutely
01:43 crazy. You know, just a couple of days before Altman had been speaking at the APEC conference
01:48 to some of the biggest world leaders out there. You know, the Chinese premier, President Biden,
01:53 you know, all of this was happening the same week. And so then to end that week with this
01:58 firing was a thunderbolt.
02:02 He has been called the face of A.I. So who fired him and really why did they do it?
02:09 The board of directors of OpenAI was really unusual because OpenAI is a nonprofit that
02:14 has this for profit sort of sub entity or company that answers to it. So all the investors,
02:21 the venture capitalists, Microsoft, everybody who'd put money into OpenAI, they were not
02:27 actually controlling the company. You know, we think of, you know, when the sea of Uber
02:30 was fired or there have been other high profile corporate takeouts like this. It was usually
02:35 investors and money people who are pulling the trigger. Here it was a very different
02:40 group. It was a more research oriented group of directors who are on a nonprofit board
02:46 and their mission wasn't to make money for shareholders. It was to bring a safe A.I.
02:52 you know, into the world for the betterment of all of humanity. So they had these very
02:55 lofty different goals than what we're used to.
02:59 And when you say safe A.I., were Sam Altman's, was his vision not aligned with that?
03:06 We're still getting to the bottom of why exactly Sam was fired. The incoming CEO, a guy named
03:11 Emmett Shear, even tweeted overnight that one of the first things he was going to do
03:15 as CEO was figure out why he was there. Like what exactly happened? Even he doesn't seem
03:20 to know. But one of the big theories and sort of questions is that given that the co-founder
03:26 of OpenAI, who initially was part of the group that was firing Sam, was the chief scientist,
03:32 a guy named Ilya Sutskever, and he was also part of a team in OpenAI that was supposed
03:37 to be focused on safety of this technology when it got smarter than a human. How would
03:43 humans be able to keep it from taking over and killing all of us, basically? That was
03:49 his focus. And so given that he was part of the team that was pulling the trigger to fire
03:53 Sam, naturally, people immediately thought, OK, there must be some crazy technical innovation
03:59 here or some risk that had come up that Sam was not focused on. Because Sam had just done
04:05 a big dev day for developers, kind of Steve Jobs-like, where he'd announced all these
04:10 new tools. And he was really leaning into these big corporate partnerships. And so,
04:15 yes, one theory was Sam was kind of on the business side. And then there was this more
04:19 research driven side that was concerned about the potential of these technologies. But the
04:24 board themselves, crazily, just put in their press release that he wasn't communicating
04:28 with them enough, which doesn't seem like a great reason to fire a rock star CEO. But
04:34 it probably wasn't the full story.
04:37 You just called him a rock star CEO. I'm wondering if he was beloved within OpenAI, because I'm
04:42 going to read you a headline. More than 500 OpenAI employees threatened to quit and join
04:47 Microsoft unless the board resigns. I don't know many employees who would quit en masse
04:52 if their CEO resigned or was fired. So was he beloved within that company?
04:59 Yes, he was very popular within the company. He's very popular within the AI community.
05:05 That's not to say that everybody loves him or that everybody loved OpenAI. But he was
05:10 a very popular CEO. He had previously run Y Combinator, which is probably the most famous
05:15 startup accelerator in the world. So he had kind of these mainstream tech allies and credentials
05:21 as well. Like one of the first people to speak out in support of him was the CEO of Airbnb,
05:25 Brian Chesky. And you saw a lot of other kind of big leaders in the tech world coming out
05:30 in support of Sam. I think employees largely supported Sam too.
05:35 The one thing we were kind of watching was like what the researchers or sort of the most
05:39 technical people who might have known about some safety issue, were they going to support
05:43 Sam? At first we thought, you know, maybe not. But then Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder
05:48 who was on the board that fired Sam, actually tweeted this morning that he regretted his
05:54 actions and that he was going to do what he could to try to sort of reunite OpenAI. But
05:59 so that seems to kind of undermine the sense that there was a real strong faction who didn't
06:04 like Sam. I want to talk about how Microsoft fits into
06:08 all of this. He is now going to work there. Microsoft does not have a seat on OpenAI's
06:14 board. Does that matter? Microsoft still has a huge amount of leverage
06:19 with OpenAI. They're a key customer and partner, and they invested $10 billion plus into the
06:26 company in the form of cash and cloud computing credits. So in a way, Microsoft kind of now
06:31 controls two halves, or at least has a lot of influence. They still have a ton of influence
06:36 over what's left of OpenAI. And then you have Greg and Sam and presumably a lot of OpenAI
06:43 employees joining a new research arm of Microsoft. So you could argue that Microsoft came out
06:49 ahead in all this, or at least still has a ton of power in the situation. But, you know,
06:55 I think their preference would have been for none of this to happen in the first place.
06:59 Microsoft is such a huge company that they want stability. They don't want to see their
07:02 stock fluctuating over things like this. And I think if they could just say, let's have
07:07 done none of this, they would still do that. But as it is, I think Satya Nadella, the CEO,
07:12 played this about as well as he could have. Alex, paint us a picture here. At the risk
07:17 of sounding obvious, why do we need to care about this? Is this ouster going to put OpenAI
07:24 behind its rivals? What does this look like? Yeah, you know, I'm fully embracing the fact
07:29 that I'm going to show up at Thanksgiving and have to re-explain this to people because
07:34 for the tech world, this is like a seismic event. And I understand that for the outside
07:38 world, it can feel a little arcane, but it is really important because OpenAI was the
07:43 biggest and sort of most visible model company that was creating these tools like ChatGPT
07:49 and was trying to build what they call an AGI, an artificial general intelligence, that
07:54 was going to be this kind of like all knowing godlike AI that is smarter than humans. And
07:59 people are going to continue trying to build that. And people are also going to continue
08:03 to build on top of tools like OpenAI. So a few immediate questions are, what does this
08:08 mean for all the companies who've been using OpenAI and its tools? Maybe for marketing
08:12 copy, maybe for emails, maybe for customer relationships. Like, you know, a lot of kind
08:17 of meat and potatoes business has been happening with these tools. And so you would want to
08:22 see business continuity there. You don't want to see the company just kind of implode fully.
08:27 That on the other hand, you have sort of the future of all these tools. Will it still be
08:31 OpenAI that's building, you know, these things that could get really advanced and either
08:36 exciting or terrifying based on where you're sitting? Will it now be Microsoft? There are
08:40 a lot of open questions there because they were the leader. And it's almost imagine like,
08:44 you know, you're watching the Olympics and the sprinters are going to the last hurdle
08:49 and the leader trips on a hurdle. And all of a sudden, it's a free for all for who could
08:54 go from second place to first place. You know, we're potentially in a situation like that.
08:59 And lest we not forget, chat GPT really broke the Internet a year ago at around this time.
09:06 And since then, AI has been in almost every conversation from every different category,
09:12 politics, tech, everything in between. But what are the implications here for the future
09:16 of AI? Because as your comparison suggests, they were the leader, they tripped and fell.
09:22 Is this going to be a domino effect? What does this look like for the future?
09:27 On the one hand, I think it's, you know, it's a setback for the AI industry because you
09:31 have federal governments, you have big companies being like, what is this mess? You know, we
09:36 can't trust this messy company with, you know, billions of dollars or the future of our government,
09:43 you know, so on the one hand, it's destabilizing and kind of hurts the cause of AI being embedded
09:48 into everything we do. On the other hand, you could argue and I would probably more
09:52 believe that these AI tools are becoming ubiquitous behind the scenes and things, you know, for
09:58 our audience, when they're writing an email, when they're, you know, texting, even that
10:03 autocorrect is a kind of AI, you know, even the crash collision in your car is a kind
10:09 of AI. And so there's another school where basically a lot of these AI tools become a
10:14 big part of our daily lives, we just don't think of it as such, just like how we wouldn't
10:17 talk about a company as a mobile company, right? Like, like, everyone's mobile, you
10:23 know, Forbes isn't an internet company, but we live on the internet, you know, so AI could
10:27 still go that way. But now who gets to decide which flavor of it it is, maybe it's not so
10:33 much open AI. So that is a big, big difference.
10:36 Alex, you're in a really interesting position. You are one of the leading reporters in this
10:42 space. You had the opportunity to talk to Sam Altman earlier this year in an exclusive
10:47 interview. I had the chance to read it before you and I talked. So I'm wondering if there's
10:52 anything missing from the national conversation in your opinion, whether it be from open AI,
10:58 Sam Altman and his ouster Microsoft and the future of AI and anything in between.
11:03 Well, first I would say I saw Sam on Wednesday in San Francisco and he we spoke briefly and
11:08 he did not seem like a guy who was about to lose his job. So even he was taken aback here.
11:14 And I think that is just really surprising. You know, I saw the first original investor
11:17 in open AI the same day. He clearly had no idea this was coming. And so the the fact
11:23 that this happened is such a surprise. It's just like, you know, for anyone who has watched
11:27 House of Cards or who likes Game of Thrones, like this was one of those ultimate shock
11:33 moves that happened at a scale that just you don't see very often. So that would be the
11:37 first thing I would say. The second thing I would say is just what this means for the
11:46 next wave of tech tools is something that we're going to see in a couple of years. So
11:52 chat GPT is still going to be around, but there's going to be another thing after chat
11:57 GPT that you and I can talk about in a year or two. And I think we may look back on this
12:02 moment and say, huh, things definitely took a turn there, didn't there? But it's just
12:07 too early for us to know exactly what that is.
12:10 And since it's too early, is there anything specifically on your radar right now that
12:15 you want to put on ours?
12:18 What I would say is I'm really interested to see where all these employees end up. It's
12:21 something that my team is reporting on. And I want to shout out the Forbes tech team.
12:26 You know, there have been a bunch of us just owning this story for the past few days. We're
12:30 not going to rest until the turkey is on the table, you know, on Thursday. And we've been
12:35 looking at a bunch of angles. One of them is, will this lead to an explosion of new
12:39 startups? Will it just mean that Microsoft just got supercharged and basically got to
12:44 buy open AI for zero dollars? We're going to have to really see where this shakes out.
12:49 It's going to take a little bit of time. You know, people might tweet I'm leaving, but
12:54 they're probably not going to also announce their personal news this week, at least. So
12:59 let's let's keep on it.
13:01 Well, Alex, I want to thank you for your tireless reporting. I saw that you and your team were
13:06 posting at 1 a.m. I think even later at some nights. So thank you. As this story develops,
13:12 I hope you come back on and share your reporting. Alex Conrad, thanks for joining me.
13:17 Thanks so much. Talk soon.
13:18 Thanks.
13:19 Bye.
13:19 Bye.
13:20 Bye.
13:20 Bye.
13:21 Bye.
13:22 Bye.
13:22 Bye.
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