- A new report has more detail on why Sam Altman was initially pushed out by the OpenAI board.
- Apparently, Altman tried to get board member Helen Toner kicked out, but it backfired.
- The report cited an unnamed source who said Altman tried to play board members off each other.
The New Yorker just published a long article that has many new details on what actually happened on the OpenAI board led to the firing of CEO Sam Altman — a fiasco that was apparently internally referred to at Microsoft as the “Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck.”
The writer just happened to have been spending the last six months working on a story focused on Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. Then, suddenly, he was in the midst of the biggest tech news scandal of the moment.
As previously reported in The New York Times, the real reason the board soured on Altman wasn’t because they thought he was racing too fast towards AGI, or artificial general intelligence; rather, he had tried to push out board member Helen Toner, and it backfired on him.
But now we have some more details, according to The New Yorker. Here’s what the outlet wrote in part (emphasis added):
Some members of the OpenAI board had found Altman an unnervingly slippery operator. For example, earlier this fall he’d confronted one member, Helen Toner, a director at the Center for Security and Emerging Technology, at Georgetown University, for co-writing a paper that seemingly criticized OpenAI for “stoking the flames of AI hype.” Toner had defended herself (though she later apologized to the board for not anticipating how the paper might be perceived). Altman began approaching other board members, individually, about replacing her. When these members compared notes about the conversations, some felt that Altman had misrepresented them as supporting Toner’s removal. “He’d play them off against each other by lying about what other people thought,” the person familiar with the board’s discussions told me. “Things like that had been happening for years.” (A person familiar with Altman’s perspective said that he acknowledges having been “ham-fisted in the way he tried to get a board member removed,” but that he hadn’t attempted to manipulate the board.)