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This podcast is supported by the New

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York Stock Exchange. In the NYSE

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video series, Future in Five, the

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NYSE asked Maggie Roshani from Nobel Food,

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her prediction for the future. One prediction

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0:26

Kevin, it's very late here. Where are you going?

0:30

Well, I just wanted to see what you had planned for the weekend.

0:32

No, we are doing an emergency

0:34

podcast because Casey, some

0:37

very big news just happened. That's right. My

0:39

red hard fork phone that I keep next to

0:41

my bed is ringing and it says there's

0:43

big news. Today, just a few hours ago

0:46

in a surprise move, OpenAI

0:48

CEO Sam Altman was pushed out

0:51

of the company. He was effectively fired by the

0:53

company's board. This move

0:55

was a total shock to everyone

0:57

in the tech industry and was especially shocking

0:59

to us

1:00

because on Wednesday of this week, you

1:02

and I both sat down for a very

1:04

long, very wide ranging interview

1:06

with none other than Sam Altman.

1:08

We did. And looking back, I wish I just asked him,

1:10

hey, do you think you're about to get fired? Yeah,

1:14

that was not one of the questions we asked him shockingly.

1:17

And to be frank, like it didn't seem

1:19

like he had any idea this was coming.

1:21

We were talking to him on what was essentially

1:23

the one year anniversary of chat GPT. We

1:26

asked him a lot of questions about OpenAI

1:28

and chat GPT and the future he saw

1:31

for artificial intelligence. And at

1:33

no point during our interview did he indicate

1:35

that anything was amiss or that anything

1:38

like this was about to happen. So I have to wonder

1:40

whether he knew or whether this was a total shock

1:42

to him, too. Yeah. Well, like you said,

1:44

he definitely did not betray

1:47

any notion that this was about

1:49

to happen when we talked to him. So

1:51

today in this emergency podcast, we are going

1:53

to talk about this news, what happened

1:56

and what it means. We are not going

1:58

to share our interview.

1:59

that we recorded with Sam Altman just yet, candidly

2:02

we're still trying to figure out what to do about it. But

2:04

today I just thought we should hop on the mics and

2:06

talk through what I think is probably the

2:09

most shocking tech story of the year

2:11

and maybe in several years. You know what

2:13

I would say, Kevin? You could train an entire large

2:15

language model just based on the text messages

2:17

that have been sent about Sam being fired today. It's

2:20

true. It's true. After

2:23

this news came out, my phone melted and

2:27

I knew it was one of those news days where my

2:30

phone's gonna run out of battery by noon. And

2:32

it did. I have charged

2:35

my phone twice today because it is just one of those

2:37

days. So let's just get the timeline

2:39

down because this all happened very, very

2:42

quickly and without much warning.

2:44

So on Friday, OpenAI

2:47

announced this firing in a

2:49

blog post. They said that Sam Altman

2:52

has been pushed out effective immediately

2:55

and that Mira Murati, the company's CTO,

2:58

chief technology officer, will be taking over

3:00

as CEO on an interim basis. They

3:03

did not give the exact reasons

3:05

for the firing, but

3:08

they said that his departure, quote, "'follows

3:10

a deliberative review process by the board,

3:13

"'which concluded that he was not consistently

3:15

candid "'in his communications with the board,

3:18

"'hindering its ability to exercise its

3:20

responsibilities. "'The board no

3:22

longer has confidence "'in his ability to

3:24

continue leading OpenAI.'" They

3:26

also said that Greg Brockman, who was the

3:28

president and co-founder of OpenAI, as

3:31

well as the chairman of its board, was

3:33

being pushed off the board. And

3:35

they sort of left it at that. Sam Altman

3:38

then shared what I would describe as a vague

3:40

post on X after the

3:42

announcement. He said, "'I loved my

3:44

time at OpenAI. "'It was transformative

3:47

for me personally "'and hopefully the world a little

3:49

bit. "'Most of all, I loved working with

3:51

such talented people. "'We'll have more to say

3:53

about what's next later.'" So,

3:55

you know, very sort of vague, no

3:58

details about what happened. or how

4:00

he felt about it. And then just

4:03

a couple hours after that, Greg Brockman

4:06

announced to the employees of OpenAI

4:08

that he was quitting in some

4:12

sort of solidarity or what many people interpreted

4:14

as solidarity with Sam. And

4:16

then on Friday night, Greg Brockman released a

4:18

statement saying that he and Sam were both,

4:21

quote, shocked and saddened by what the board

4:23

did today. He gave a little rundown

4:25

of his side of the story, basically said that both

4:27

he and Sam were blindsided by these texts

4:30

from Ilya Setskever, the

4:32

chief scientist of OpenAI, who

4:35

told them both sort of minutes before this

4:37

news went out that they were being removed

4:40

from their roles. And

4:42

he claimed that he was still trying to figure out exactly what

4:44

happened, but that he had been taken by

4:46

total surprise on this. So within

4:49

the span of several hours, OpenAI's

4:51

board has pushed out Sam Altman, the CEO,

4:54

Greg Brockman, the COO, and

4:56

just left everyone at the company, reeling

4:59

and wondering what happened. That's

5:01

right. And based on our reporting,

5:04

Kevin, we know that none of the rank and

5:06

file at OpenAI appeared

5:08

to know this before it was announced

5:10

to the public. So this sort of came as

5:12

a shock to them. Ina Fried at Axios

5:15

reported that Microsoft apparently got one

5:17

minutes notice before this

5:20

news was shared. Microsoft, of course, is one

5:22

of their biggest partners. That's right. And

5:25

I can tell you based on my reporting that last

5:27

week, Sam and Sacha Nadella, the CEO of

5:29

Microsoft, were spending a lot of time together and

5:31

Sacha did not get any indication, again,

5:34

whatsoever that anything was up and that this

5:36

might happened. Microsoft's stock

5:38

dropped after this news was shared, as

5:40

you might imagine, as people now worry about what this means

5:43

for the future of their AI efforts.

5:45

Nadella put out a statement later in the day, essentially

5:48

affirming his commitment to OpenAI,

5:50

saying they have a long-term deal in place and expressing

5:53

his confidence in Mira to lead the company. Yeah,

5:55

so Casey, what are you hearing from your

5:58

reporting? I assume you've been calling around. all

6:00

day trying to figure out what happened here. Well, I have

6:02

to tell you, Kevin, I wish I'd done a better job reporting

6:05

because despite sending what I would

6:07

estimate to be 40,000 text messages,

6:09

I still don't have the answers that I want,

6:11

you know? What I don't want to do is to

6:13

speculate irresponsibly, but what I can tell

6:16

you based on having seen other CEOs

6:18

get fired in other circumstances is

6:21

that Greg Brockman quitting,

6:23

I think, tells us a lot about

6:25

what is going on here. What do you mean? When

6:28

CEOs resign due to personal scandals,

6:30

they do not typically have a bunch of people lining

6:33

up with them to follow them out the door, right?

6:36

And so when you have a co-founder of this company saying,

6:38

based on the fact that Sam was fired, I

6:41

am quitting this company, that is a signal

6:43

to me that the dispute that is at

6:45

the center of whatever this is, is

6:47

related to open AI, right? Now

6:50

we don't know if it's related to a business

6:52

decision, a product decision, an AI

6:55

safety decision. I can tell you all

6:57

of those rumors are swirling inside

7:00

the company and out, but

7:02

we don't know. I can also say that

7:05

the number of people who know the

7:08

real reason behind this right now

7:11

is extremely limited. I have been talking

7:13

to a number of people very close

7:15

to this situation who I would think would

7:18

know, and they're coming back and they're saying,

7:20

we are hearing cricket. So this

7:22

information was very, very tightly

7:24

held. I do think it will come out eventually

7:27

and maybe soon, but as of recording time,

7:29

we just don't have it. Yeah, I expect that

7:32

every tech reporter in America is

7:34

chasing this story right now. I've also been making

7:36

calls and texting people all day trying to

7:38

figure out what the heck happened here. And

7:41

I think you're right. I mean, this came as a total

7:43

surprise to almost

7:45

everyone at open AI. They learned about

7:47

it the same time the rest of the world did. I

7:51

heard that there was an all hands meeting

7:54

in which employees were

7:56

sort of shocked and dismayed

7:58

many of them. Altman was a very

8:00

popular CEO among the

8:02

rank and file at OpenAI. So this was

8:04

not a situation where people kind of

8:07

had an easy explanation ready to go. Oh,

8:09

this was clearly this thing that

8:11

they could point to. They seem totally

8:14

baffled and totally shocked by this news.

8:17

And I heard it described as a hostile

8:19

takeover or a coup. Those

8:22

are the kinds of words that people inside

8:24

and close to OpenAI have been using to describe

8:27

what happened today. I think

8:29

it is important to underscore what you said,

8:31

Kevin, which is that Sam Altman was a very

8:33

popular leader at OpenAI. He's

8:36

a very popular leader in Silicon Valley

8:38

in general. Of course, before OpenAI, he

8:41

ran Y Combinator, the incubator

8:44

that is responsible for companies, including

8:46

Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox,

8:48

a lot of other famous companies. So Sam

8:51

Altman is one of the best connected people in Silicon

8:53

Valley. And after the news broke, I just saw

8:56

boldface name after boldface name leaping

8:59

onto X to express their support for him. Brian

9:01

Chesky from Airbnb, Eric Schmidt,

9:03

the former CEO of Google and many,

9:05

many more. All of them were essentially saying,

9:08

we stand with Sam.

9:11

So, you know, it shows you the amount of support

9:13

that he has. And, you know, I have to

9:15

say, I think it raises real questions

9:18

about the future of OpenAI, because

9:21

part of being a great leader at OpenAI for

9:23

Sam meant being a great recruiter, which is one

9:25

of the real things that he did. There's

9:28

a limited amount of top tier talent

9:30

in AI world, right? And Sam, because

9:33

he is so well known from running Y Combinator, was

9:35

able to go out and get a lot of the best people

9:37

to come in and work at that company. So there were a lot of people

9:39

who went to work today because they wanted to work for Sam Altman. And

9:42

on Monday, they're going to go into work working

9:44

for someone else. And so I think the question is, are

9:47

they so tied to that mission that they are

9:49

going to stick with the company when inevitably

9:51

it comes out, whatever this dispute was? Yeah,

9:53

it's totally baffling to me. Something

9:56

just isn't adding up. This is a

9:58

very unusual circumstance. You

10:00

do not see boards firing

10:03

CEOs, very popular CEOs

10:05

of very popular companies in this

10:07

way, particularly. Usually if a CEO

10:10

is going to be pushed out, the board will sort

10:12

of do the nicety of saying,

10:15

this person is stepping aside to spend more time

10:17

with their families, sort of the cliche, or

10:19

to work on other projects. The

10:22

board of OpenAI really did

10:25

throw Sam under the bus in this statement, which

10:27

makes me think that whatever happened, it must have

10:29

been bigger than just a simple

10:32

disagreement. This, I actually

10:34

think, is a good point to talk about

10:36

the mess of OpenAI in general. And

10:39

we have talked about it on the show before. There's

10:41

basically no company that we talk about that has

10:43

a more complicated structure than this company.

10:46

There is a nonprofit board

10:49

that operates a for-profit

10:51

company. On that nonprofit

10:54

board, which voted to fire Sam

10:56

today, most of the members do not own

10:58

shares of the company. Sam

11:01

himself did not directly own

11:03

stock in the company. And so you

11:06

just have this weird situation where you have a for-profit company

11:08

owned by a nonprofit. That is just weird.

11:11

And if you were to say, does that scenario

11:13

make it likelier that we would see something like we saw today,

11:16

then not like, yes, it actually does. Okay?

11:19

So I think that's part of what's going on here. The

11:21

second thing I would say is that OpenAI

11:24

has just been a messy company always, right?

11:27

It was famously co-founded by Elon Musk. Elon

11:29

Musk had a massive falling out with those

11:31

folks and wound up walking away.

11:34

A bunch of other co-founders at the company had

11:36

a big falling out with Sam and the

11:38

other folks there. And they went to start an anthropic,

11:41

who's CEO, Dario Amade. We have had on the show. He

11:43

is the CEO of that company. He also was an OpenAI

11:45

before then. So in

11:47

the AI world, there are a lot

11:49

of disputes, and they end with people

11:52

slamming doors and often going to start

11:54

their own AI companies. Yeah, we should talk

11:56

just for a second about the board for one more bit,

11:59

because there's something... You said that I want

12:01

to draw out which is that the board

12:03

members of this company Do not

12:05

for the most part own shares

12:08

in the company that is that is unusual

12:10

or for company boards Usually

12:12

you'd have like a venture capitalist on there

12:15

or you know, maybe some some early

12:18

Executives or just you know business

12:20

people that the CEO knows and his friends

12:22

with this board. It's a

12:25

small board. First of all Before

12:27

today it consisted of Greg Brockman

12:30

Sam Altman Obviously open AI is

12:32

chief scientist Ilya Sutskivar And

12:35

then there are these sort of independent

12:38

non-employee Directors including

12:40

Adam DiAngelo who's the CEO of Quora?

12:43

Tasha Macaulay who is a technology

12:46

entrepreneur and Helen Toner

12:48

who is a Scholar at the Georgetown

12:51

Center for security and emerging technology

12:54

and of those board members I think it's worth spending

12:56

a beat talking about the last two

12:59

that I mentioned because This is sort

13:01

of one hint that a lot of people

13:03

I've been talking to today have been pointing me

13:05

toward to Sort of try to read the tea

13:07

leaves about what happened during this transition

13:10

period Which is that

13:12

Tasha Macaulay and Helen Toner

13:14

are Aligned with the

13:17

effective altruism movement now we could talk

13:19

a lot more and we have talked on the show about the effect

13:21

of altruism Movement it is behind

13:24

a lot of the AI safety research

13:26

that is going on in the AI industry And

13:28

these are people who tend to be more worried about things

13:31

like existential risk from AI now

13:34

We don't know who voted which

13:36

ways on the board But some folks that

13:38

I've been talking today sort of said well It's

13:41

possible that this was some sort of a you know

13:43

an EA Lead who against

13:45

Sam Altman for some reason having to do with

13:48

AI safety But again that is very vague

13:50

and not confirmed and so we probably shouldn't speculate

13:53

about it too much So Casey, what do you think

13:55

this does mean for the future of open

13:57

AI like can they survive this scam?

14:00

as they have survived other scandals in

14:02

the history of the organization? Or is

14:04

there something different about this? I mean,

14:06

sure. I think

14:09

the next 30 to 90 days

14:11

are critical for this company. Is

14:14

it the case that a bunch of other

14:16

top executives and engineers

14:19

at this company follow Sam and Greg

14:21

out the door and start another company

14:23

with them? If so, then yes, I think that's

14:25

a very serious challenge to open AI. I

14:28

think it also might be one of the best days anthropic

14:30

has had in a while. It's almost certainly the best day Google

14:32

bar has had in a while, okay, right? Because

14:34

these folks now have an opportunity maybe to

14:37

get ahead while their top competitor

14:39

is trying to pick up the pieces. The

14:42

second thing I would say is they still have a

14:44

lot of advantages. GPT-4 is

14:46

the best generally available large

14:49

language model. Chat GPT is

14:51

probably the most popular chatbot on the

14:53

market. It's almost certainly the one that's making the

14:55

most money. A lot of that is going to stop

14:58

being true because it's fascinating to us

15:00

as it is who is running this company. To

15:03

most of its users, the question is just, hey, can I

15:05

sign up for Chat GPT Plus yet?

15:08

It's interesting, Kevin, when you and I sat down with Sam, it seemed

15:10

like the biggest problem in his life was that he had to pause signups

15:12

for Chat GPT Plus because they had

15:14

gotten too popular, right? So they were

15:16

in the middle of their kind of infrastructure and engineering

15:19

crisis before the leadership crisis

15:21

started. I don't

15:23

think OpenAI is going to collapse tomorrow,

15:26

but is this a very real risk

15:28

to the company? I do think it is. What do you think? Yeah,

15:32

something is just not adding up for me. It

15:35

is truly inconceivable

15:37

to me that the

15:39

board of OpenAI would push

15:42

out Sam and sort

15:44

of by extension Greg Brockman without

15:48

a really good reason for doing so. I mean, this is

15:50

a CEO who has generated

15:54

enormous value for OpenAI and has

15:56

for all of the... laws

16:00

that his critics might find

16:03

with him. He's been a very effective

16:05

leader in terms of positioning open AI

16:08

at the head of the pack when it comes to AI. I

16:10

don't know. I guess

16:13

we'll find out more in the coming days.

16:18

But it just truly does not square to

16:20

me that it could be something like

16:23

a disagreement about AI safety

16:25

or something without being something. I mean,

16:28

this is also a board of people that Sam Altman,

16:30

for the most part, picked. So it's not as

16:32

if these are people who he had a history of

16:35

open conflict with. Something

16:38

happened here. I mean, look, something

16:41

did happen. And while

16:44

I cannot speculate, and I don't have any reporting,

16:46

I would just say that Semaphore reported

16:48

today that Sam has been in the

16:50

middle of raising a new venture fund. He

16:53

has other side projects. He

16:55

co-founded Worldcoin. That is the

16:57

orb that scans your eyeballs and gives

16:59

you crypto. And

17:02

it might be that none of that has anything to do with what

17:04

happened today. But I would say that in general,

17:07

if you are a CEO, and you're

17:09

also a CEO of other companies, or you're building

17:11

other projects, or you're engaged

17:14

in a lot of other complicated deals

17:16

and investments, that

17:18

stuff does get messy, actually. And there

17:21

are disclosure rules. If you

17:23

don't put the right thing down on

17:26

a forum, the next thing you know, you could find yourself

17:28

in a lot of trouble. So we have actually seen a lot of

17:30

CEOs go down over the year for

17:32

what are essentially financial entanglements.

17:35

So again, as I grasp for a what

17:37

could possibly have happened that would make the board

17:40

do this, I have to say that's the

17:42

number one place that I've been coming down. Yeah.

17:44

So aside from the sort of main

17:46

question here, which is what the heck happened? There's

17:49

also this question of like, well, what is next

17:51

for open AI and for Sam Altman,

17:54

for open AI, I imagine under Mira

17:56

Morati, they will continue to, you

17:58

know, refine and and launched new products.

18:02

I imagine Microsoft,

18:04

which is sort of heavily dependent on OpenAI

18:07

for a lot of its AI work, will try

18:09

to continue to work with the company. But

18:12

I can't imagine that Satya Nadella, the

18:14

CEO of Microsoft, was happy to see this news. He

18:16

and Sam Altman were on stage

18:19

at OpenAI's Dev Day just

18:21

recently, and it didn't seem

18:23

like there was anything but love between the two. So

18:25

I think for a lot of employees

18:27

of OpenAI, what I'm hearing is that they are trying

18:30

to figure out what to do with themselves.

18:32

As you mentioned, Sam was the reason that a lot

18:34

of them came to work at OpenAI. And so

18:37

I imagine that the recruiters of

18:39

Silicon Valley are gonna be very busy in the coming

18:41

weeks. Yeah, and

18:44

also, no disrespect to the new leadership

18:46

at OpenAI, they have very strong backgrounds. They're

18:49

clearly incredibly talented technologists,

18:52

but I wouldn't be surprised if there were people over at Microsoft

18:55

sort of feeling like maybe they actually just gained a lot

18:57

of power over OpenAI, and that maybe they

18:59

can now steer the future a little bit

19:01

more strongly than they could when they had Sam

19:04

Altman at the helm. Yeah. All

19:06

right, well, Casey, I'm sorry

19:08

that our planned week off next

19:10

week has been interrupted. This keeps happening.

19:13

This summer, when we both planned to take a week off,

19:16

we had the launch of threads.

19:18

That was a big surprise, and we had to cut our vacations

19:20

for it to do that. I'm beginning to think the problem

19:23

here is us. We plan to have an off week next week

19:25

and drop this big Sam Altman interview, and now

19:27

Sam Altman's been pushed out. So you could

19:29

call it the hard fork curse, or you could just

19:31

call it bad luck. Yeah, well,

19:33

call it what you want, but we

19:36

do like making the podcast, and thanks to everybody

19:38

who sent us messages asking us to do

19:40

an emergency pod. We did wanna hop on

19:43

and tell you what we know, which isn't much, but

19:45

obviously the story has our full attention. When

19:48

we know more, you will be the first

19:50

to know, and my guess is that Sam Altman

19:52

is going to continue to play a role in the history

19:55

of AI. Yes, this does not feel like someone

19:57

who is ready to ride off into the sunset. I-

20:00

I, on the other hand, am absolutely about to ride off into

20:02

the sunset. Actually, the sunset is a long time

20:04

ago, and now I have

20:06

to go eat dinner. Okay, well, thanks

20:08

for doing the emergency pod with me. And

20:11

we will reconvene when we

20:13

have more information.

20:44

Why rely on luck to get you through next-level

20:46

moments?

20:47

Stop crossing your fingers during a data center

20:49

migration. Don't

20:51

knock on wood to hope for a successful

20:53

office expansion.

20:54

Stop saying well wishes and looking to

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Hard Fork is produced by Davis

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Land and Rachel Cohn. We're edited

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by Jen Poynak. Today's show was engineered

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by Corey Shruppel. Original music by Dan Powell. Our

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audience editor is Nel Galocli. Video

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production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergeson.

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Special thanks to Paula Schumann, Thuy Nguyen Tam,

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Kate Lepresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can

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email us at hardfork at nytimes.com. Especially

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if you're an OpenAI board member who knows what happened. Yeah, that'd be

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great.

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Thank you.

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Cappella University is rethinking higher

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differently at cappella.edu.