The Silicon Valley CEO of the artificial intelligence-powered chatbots ChatGPT and GPT-4, Sam Altman, has been fired by the company’s board of directors, which stated that it has lost faith in him.
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The board claimed in announcing Altman’s dismissal, which has sent shockwaves across the fledgling AI business, that an internal inquiry discovered that Altman was not always truthful.
The statement read;
“Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities. The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”
OpenAI announced Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO until a permanent successor is chosen.
ChatGPT launched late last year, making Altman an overnight quasi-celebrity and the face of a new crop of AI tools that can generate images and texts in response to simple user prompts. The technology is called generative AI and has since been deployed by Microsoft on its search engine and other tools. Google has a rival called “Bard,” and other generative AI tools have been developed in recent months.
Not long after its release, ChatGPT became a household name almost synonymous with AI itself. CEOs used it to draft emails, people built websites with no prior coding experience, and it passed exams from law and business schools.
Although Altman has long been an advocate of AI, he is also one of its biggest critics. In testimony before Congress earlier this year, Altman described the technology’s current boom as a pivotal moment