Sam Altman’s tussle with OpenAI board sheds light on ‘secret’ WhatsApp group with over 100 CEOs: Report
Sam is out, was the first text on the WhatsApp group immediately after the sacking of OpenAI chief was announced. What followed was a long round of deliberations which included top leadership of Microsoft like CEO Satya Nadella and CTO Kevin Scott. Microsoft has invested around $13 billion in the AI company, and CEO Satya Nadella was informed about Sam Altman’s ouster at the eleventh hour as he trusted the leader and might have attempted to stop his ouster.
Immediately after the news broke, the WhatsApp group was abuzz with other CEOs wanting to know what went wrong with Sam Altman.
Kevin Scott dialed Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI, who was asked to step up as the interim CEO of OpenAI. Mira Murati didn’t reveal much to Scott, after which he took CEO Satya Nadella in the loop. Soon, the OpenAI board released a statement claiming that Altman was not consistently candid in his communications with the OpenAI board.
This was a very painful thing and felt to me, personally, just as a human, super unfair – the way it was handled, Sam Altman said at Trevor Noah’s podcast after his reinstatement as the OpenAI CEO.
While revealing more on the day he was fired, Altman said that his phone almost broke with the tons of messages that he received after his ouster. And then in the next like half hour, I got so many messages that iMessage like broke on my phone. My phone was just unusable because it was just like notifications non-stop and iMessage hit this thing where it stopped working for a while. That message got delivered late, then it marked everything as read, so I couldn’t even like tell like, he said.
