Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altmans OpenAI

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Prologue

A Run for the Throne

On Friday, November 17, 2023, around noon Pacific time, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Silicon Valley's golden boy, avatar of the generative AI revolution, logged on to a Google Meet to see four of his five board members staring at him.

From his video square, board member Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, was brief: Altman was being fired. The announcement would go out momentarily.

Altman was in his room at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas to attend the city's first Formula One race in a generation, a star-studded affair with guests from Rihanna to David Beckham. The trip was a short reprieve in the middle of the punishing travel schedule he had maintained ever since the company released ChatGPT about a year earlier. For a moment, he was too stunned to speak. He looked away as he sought to regain his composure. As the conversation continued, he tried in his characteristic way to smooth things over.

"How can I help?" he asked.

The board told him to support the interim chief executive they had selected, Mira Murati, who had been serving as his chief technology officer. Altman, still confused and wondering whether this was a bad dream, acquiesced.

Minutes later, Sutskever sent another Google Meet link to Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and a close ally to Altman who had been the only board member missing from the previous meeting. Sutskever told Brockman he would no longer be on the board but would retain his role at the company.

The public announcement went up soon thereafter. "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."


On the face of it, OpenAI had been at the height of its power. Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, it had become Silicon Valley’s most spectacular success story. ChatGPT was the fastest-growing consumer app in history. The startup’s valuation was on the kind of meteoric ascent that made investors salivate and top talent clamor to join the rocket-ship company. Just weeks before, it had been valued at up to $90 billion as part of a tender offer it was in the middle of finalizing that would allow employees to sell their shares to said eager investors. A few days before, it had held a highly anticipated and highly celebrated event to launch its most aggressive slate of products.

Altman was, as far as the public was concerned, the man who had made it all happen. He had spent the spring and summer touring the world, reaching a level of celebrity that was leading the media to compare him to Taylor Swift. He had wowed just about everyone with his unassuming small frame, bold declarations, and apparent sincerity.

Before Vegas, he had once again been globe-trotting, sitting on a panel at the APEC CEO Summit, delivering lines with his usual dazzling effect.

"Why are you devoting your life to this work?" Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of the Emerson Collective and Steve Jobs's widow, had asked him.

"I think this will be the most transformative and beneficial technology humanity has yet invented," he said. "Four times now in the history of OpenAI-the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks-I have gotten to be in the room, when we sort of push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward, and getting to do that is, like, the professional honor of a lifetime."


Shocked employees learned about Altman’s firing just as everyone else did, the link to the public announcement zipping from one phone to the next across the company. It was the chasm between the news and Altman’s glowing reputation that startled them the most. The company was by now pushing eight hundred people. These days, employees had fewer opportunities to meet and interact with their CEO in person. But his charming demeanor on global stages was not unlike how he behaved during all-hands meetings, at company functions, and, when he wasn’t traveling, around the office.

As the rumor mill kicked into a frenzy and employees doomscrolled X, formerly Twitter, for any shreds of information, someone in the office latched on to what they saw as the most logical explanation and shouted, "Altman's running for president!" It created a momentary release of tension, before people realized this was not the case, and speculation started anew with fresh intensity and dread. Had Altman done something illegal? Maybe it was related to his sister, employees wondered. She had alleged in tweets that had gone viral a month before that her brother had abused her. Maybe it wasn't something illegal but ethically untoward, they speculated, perhaps related to Altman's other investments or his fundraising with Saudi investors for a new AI chip venture.

Sutskever posted an announcement in OpenAI's Slack. In two hours, he would hold a virtual all-hands meeting to answer employee questions. "That was the longest two hours ever," an employee remembers.


Sutskever, Murati, and OpenAI’s remaining executives came onto the screen side by side, stiff and unrehearsed, as the all-hands streamed to employees in the office and working from home.

Sutskever looked solemn. He was known among employees as a deep thinker and a mystic, regularly speaking in spiritual terms with a force of sincerity that could be endearing to some and off-putting to others. He was also a goofball and gentlehearted. He wore shirts with animals on them to the office and loved to paint them as well-a cuddly cat, cuddly alpacas, a cuddly fire-breathing dragon-alongside abstract faces and everyday objects. Some of his amateur paintings hung around the office, including a trio of flowers blossoming in the shape of OpenAI's logo, a symbol of what he always urged employees to build: "A plurality of humanity-loving AGIs."

Now, he attempted to project a sense of certainty to anxious employees submitting rapid-fire questions via an online document. But Sutskever was an imperfect messenger; he was not one that excelled at landing messages with his audience.

"Was there a specific incident that led to this?" Murati read aloud first from the list of employee questions.

"Many of the questions in the document will be about the details," Sutskever responded. "What, when, how, who, exactly. I wish I could go into the details. But I can't." Anyone curious should read the press release, he added. "It actually says a lot of stuff. Read it maybe a few times."

The response baffled employees. They had just received cataclysmic news. Surely, as the people most directly affected by the situation, they deserved more specifics than the general public.

Murati read off a few more questions. How did this affect the relationship with Microsoft? Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest backer and exclusive licensee of its technologies, was the sole supplier of its computing infrastructure. Without it, all the startup's work-performing research, training AI models, launching products-would grind to a halt. Murati responded that she didn't expect it to be affected. They had just had a call with Microsoft's chief executive Satya Nadella and chief technology officer Kevin Scott. "They're all very committed to our work," she said.

What about OpenAI's tender offer? Employees with a certain tenure had been given the option to sell what could amount to millions of dollars' worth of their equity. The tender was so soon that many had made plans to buy property, or already had. "The tender-we're, um, we're going to see," Brad Lightcap, the chief operating officer, waffled. "I am in touch with investors leading the tender and some of our largest investors already on the cap table. All have committed their steadfast support to the company."