“Blessing In Disguise”: Sam Altman Reflects On Being Fired As OpenAI CEO
Mr Altman still has some hard feelings about the whole ordeal.
Recently, ChatGPT maker OpenAI witnessed a harrowing time after it fired CEO Sam Altman. The artificial intelligence community witnessed high drama for five days before OpenAI reached an agreement to bring back Sam Altman as the CEO and appoint new board members after nearly all of its employees threatened to quit over his ouster. The company’s President and co-founder Greg Brockman also rejoined after a chaotic period that highlighted deep tensions at the heart of the Artificial Intelligence community. Now, speaking to Trevor Noah on the “What Now” podcast, Mr Altman stated that he learnt a lot from the whole incident despite its “painful cost”.
“The empathy I gained out of this whole experience, and my recompilation of values, for sure was a blessing in disguise. It was at a painful cost, but I’m happy to have had the experience in that sense,” he said.
Mr Altman was in Las Vegas, for the Formula One Grand Prix when he got the news that the board had sacked him. “I never got to watch any race that whole weekend. I was in my hotel room, took this call, had no idea what it was gonna be, and got fired by the board.”
According to Mr Altman, his phone began to overflow with texts to the point that iMessage stopped functioning. “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 like 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 further said.
Although he stated he was not considering going back to OpenAI just yet, he was certain he wanted to continue working on creating generalised artificial intelligence. “It felt like a dream. I was confused, it was chaotic. It did not feel real,” he said.
Although the saga is over, the CEO still has some hard feelings about the whole ordeal.”This was a very painful thing and felt to me, personally, just as a human, super unfair – the way it was handled,” he said.
Recently, Mr Altman was also named the “CEO of the year” by Time Magazine for his remarkable contributions to the tech industry.
