Sam Altman is no longer the CEO of the company
OpenAI – OpenAI CEO and Founder — Greg Brockman ‘Between AI and AI in the World’s Largest Robotic Intelligence’
As part of the transition announced Friday, OpenAI’s president and board chairman, Greg Brockman, will be stepping down as chairman of the board but will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. The statement did not give an explanation for the change.
Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, will take over as interim CEO effective immediately, the company said, while it searches for a permanent replacement.
I loved my time at openai,” wrote Altman on X. It changed me for the better and I hope the world does the same. most of all i loved working with such talented people. Will have more to say later.
He was thrust into the global spotlight as the face of OpenAI due to the explosion of public consciousness. He was mobbed by fans at an event in London during his world tour earlier this year.
He predicted AI will prove to be “the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we’ve had so far.” But he also acknowledged the need for guardrails to protect humanity from the existential threat posed by the quantum leaps being taking by computers.
Silicon Valley wunderkind Altman inspired the revolution that is AI technology: The road to self-destruction, and millions of years more in the future
The company said it has a board that consists of four people, three of which are not employees.
OpenAI started out as a nonprofit research laboratory when it launched in December 2015 with financial backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated aims were to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
Altman, now 38, has been seen as a Silicon Valley wunderkind since his early 20s. He was hired by the co- founder, Paul Graham, to lead the YCombinator startup incubator.
“Sam is one of the smartest people I know, and understands startups better than perhaps anyone I know, including myself,” read Graham’s 2014 announcement that Altman would become the incubator’s president. Graham said at the time that Altman was “one of those rare people who manage to be both fearsomely effective and yet fundamentally benevolent.”
That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business OpenAI LP, and shifted nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT large language model for generating paragraphs of readable text. Around the same time, Musk, who had co-chaired its board, resigned from the board in a move that the startup tied to eliminating a “potential future conflict for Elon” due to Tesla’s work on building automated driving systems.
The surprising capabilities of ChatGPT, such as solving complex puzzles and handling questions that appear to require human-like reasoning, stunned AI researchers, amazed the public, and triggered an arms race among big tech companies to build more powerful AI. The bot’s success turned Altman into a tech celebrity, consulted by world leaders on the future path of AI technology.
Altman appeared yesterday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco, telling hundreds of business and government leaders that AI systems could solve humanity’s most-pressing problems if their development were pursued responsibly.
“We’re on a path to self-destruction as a species right now,” he said, sitting alongside executives from Meta and Google. “We need new technology if we want to flourish for tens, hundreds of thousands, and millions of years more.”
This was conducted in July 2023 for a WIRED cover story. It is being published today after Sam Altman’s sudden departure to provide a glimpse at the thinking of the powerful AI company’s new boss.
There are so many big-deal moments, it’s hard to remember. We see crazy things every day, we live in the future. I remember GPT-3 being able to translate. I speak several languages including Italian, Albanian and English. I remember just creating pair prompts of English and Italian. And all of a sudden, even though we never trained it to translate in Italian, it could do it fairly well.
The Change from a Pure Nonprofit to a For-Profit: What Do You Think About It? Why Should We Discard the Insights of OpenAI?
You were at OpenAI early enough to be there when it changed from a pure nonprofit to reorganizing so that a for-profit entity lived inside the structure. What did you think about that?
It was not something that was done lightly. To understand how to make our models better, we need to deploy them at scale. That costs a lot of money. It requires you to have a business plan, because your generous nonprofit donors aren’t going to give billions like investors would. As far as I know, there’s no other structure like this. The key thing was protecting the mission of the nonprofit.
