Why Sam Altman Was Fired

Today, OpenAI Founder/ CEO was fired from his position at the company by the Board of Directors due to problems with Altman’s “communication” with the board. Since then OpenAI CTO, Mira Murati has been named interim CEO.

The purpose of this article is to debunk the information currently making it’s way around social media regarding Sam Altman’s departure. So let’s get into it-

Sexual Harassment Claim By Sister- Sam Altman’s sister Annie Altman went on X in 2021 accusing her brother of sexually harassing her when she was 4 years old. This issue gained quite a lot of traction with the rising popularity of ChatGPT and Sam Altman’s rise to fame. And it has yet again resurfaced with people theorizing that Altman was fired to shield OpenAI from any scandal related to this particular issue.
But the problem with this theory is that Annie’s allegations aren’t accompanied by any evidence. She has had mental health issues ever since she was a teenager with her having taken Prozac ever since the age of 12, she claims to have had flashes of this memory ever since 2020 after her father’s death as she began experiencing PTSD and to make things even more suspicious, her allegations of sexual harassment happened to start the same year that Altman went onto take the CEO position at OpenAI full time. It is also worth mentioning that this follows a pattern of her having her rich brother bail her out, including going as far as to say that she became an OnlyFans “sex worker” because her entire family stopped her from accessing her trust fund until and unless she decided to resume taking Prozac, an anti-depressant after her father’s death. Multiple such incidences have occurred over the past 8 years.
But coming back to the matter at hand; in order for OpenAI’s board to fire Altman due to this issue, an internal investigation would have been needed into the matter which would have involved interviews with Altman himself, his family members and his sister. But statements from Sam’s coworkers suggest that Sam had no idea that he was going to be let go.

Cyber-security Issue- Another theory that’s gaining traction on Twitter is the occurence of a security issue within ChatGPT in the last 2 weeks that Altman was trying to understate or cover-up. This theory arises from the fact that GPTs were announced earlier this month, followed by Microsoft, a large investor in OpenAI asking employees to avoid OpenAI’s services due to a “security issue”. This was followed by Altman tweeting that “No more ChatGPT Plus signups… systems can’t handle the volume ever since the devday….”, for context; ChatGPT Plus is required to have access to OpenAI’s newest offering- customized GPTs. This is then followed by Sam being fired 2 days later.
But this theory is even more baseless when you consider that the interim CEO, Mira was the CTO & Head of Security under Altman and was a member of the board as well.

Sam Altman Was Rushing Development- This theory mainly originates from a Reddit users post that Altman wanted to accelerate development of AI at all costs negating security concerns in the process and in turn breaking OpenAI’s core rules of being cautious with development. However this theory seems to be baseless because the alleged insider referred to OpenAI as a “non-profit” in the post and his account of events at OpenAI is paradoxical when compares to Altman’s colleagues that have said that Altman is very cautious with AI because he fears that his efforts may lead to an evil AGI.

UPDATE: Bloomberg has confirmed that Sam Altman’s departure was due to a series of disagreements between him and Ilya Sutskever who is an important AI researcher at OpenAI and holds a position in the board. Apparently the decision to fire Sam and demote Greg was discussed for a long time during which Ilya got the votes to push Sam out. More details on this are unavailable at the moment but I cover more of it on the official Sam Altman story. It’s also worth mentioning that Microsoft was not involved and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft was furious with the boards decision.

It is also worth mentioning that OpenAI co-founder, Greg Brockman was also demoted to a “President” role, but has since resigned stating that he couldn’t work at OpenAI following Sam’s departure.

We will update this page with more info as it comes out.