The 38-year-old technology guru, Sam Altman, has been sacked as CEO of OpenAI, the tech company that created ChatGPT bot, an artificial intelligence chatbot with unprecedented capabilities, churning out human-level content like poems or artwork in just seconds.
The company’s board of directors in a statement on Friday, November 17, said: “The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., which acts as the overall governing body for all OpenAI activities, today announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
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.
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.
