Over a year after he was briefly fired as OpenAI chief executive, Sam Altman said he felt “really f—ed” by the former board members who made the decision.
Altman, who was fired for four days in November 2023 after the startup’s board concluded “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board,” told Bloomberg that he was asked almost immediately to return. However, when former Twitch (AMZN+1.80%) CEO Emmett Shear was announced as Altman’s replacement instead, the AI leader said that’s when he “got the most mad in the whole period.”
“And I was like, ‘All right, now I’m f—ing really done,’ because that was real deception,” Altman said.
After being reinstated as chief executive, Altman said he “had a complete mess” on his hands that “got worse every day.” As part of his agreement to return, Altman wanted OpenAI’s board to resign.
“[A]ll those people that I feel like really f—ed me and f—ed the company were gone, and now I had to clean up their mess,” Altman told Bloomberg.
Despite his disagreements with the former OpenAI board, Altman said he thinks it “was genuine in their level of conviction and concern about AGI going wrong.” AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, and is the phase when an AI system will be capable of performing human-level tasks.
“[M]aybe also that, like, AGI was right around the corner and we weren’t being responsible with it,” Altman said about the former board’s decision. “So I can hold respect for that while totally disagreeing with the details of everything else.”
Altman said he thinks “AGI will probably get developed during” the incoming Trump administration. The OpenAI chief personally donated $1 million to the president-elect’s inaugural fund.
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