The former OpenAI CTO had receipts. But they mostly confuse her own story.
The week leading up to Thanksgiving 2023 was the AI industry’s biggest soap opera moment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was abruptly ousted from his role at the ChatGPT maker. The explanation? That Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Now, via witness testimony and trial exhibits in Musk v. Altman, the public is getting a concrete look behind the scenes of that dramatic weekend for the first time, much of it centered on former CTO Mira Murati.
It was a unique situation in that the roller coaster of a power play — which seemed to change every hour — took place, in many ways, publicly. The board’s strikingly vague blog post announcing Altman’s ouster was posted on OpenAI’s website, immediately sparking a laundry list of conspiracy theories bandied about on X. (It turned out that the impetus had allegedly been a pattern of lying or omission by Altman, whether about OpenAI’s safety processes, about his own ownership stake in OpenAI’s startup fund, or about the release of certain tools or features like ChatGPT.) Other OpenAI executives and AI industry leaders made public statements in support of Altman. An online campaign began among hundreds of OpenAI employees in which they posted a heart if they supported Altman’s reinstatement, and many posted the phrase, “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” Rumors swirled as countless onlookers waited with bated breath for any new kernel of information. (I covered the whole thing from a backpacking trip in Patagonia, armed with only an iPhone notes app and no laptop.)
