Chief technology officer Mira Murati is the company’s interim CEO.

OpenAI, the technology giant behind the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, has announced that its board of directors decided to fire Sam Altman, a co-founder of the company, from the position of CEO. 

This is an unexpected turn of events, given that the reasons of his departure were not revealed and neither Altman nor anyone else had ever mentioned about a conflict between the CEO and the board.

“The board of directors of OpenAI, Inc., […] today (17 November) announced that Sam Altman will depart as CEO and leave the board of directors. Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, effective immediately,” says a statement on OpenAI’s blog. 

"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," the announcement reads.

Mira Murati, the company’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO, with immediate effect. Murati is an Albanian business manager. She served as chief technology officer of OpenAI since 2018. 

OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner. As a part of the transition, Greg Brockman will step down as chairman of the board and will remain in his role at the company, reporting to the CEO. 

OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, has not disclosed the motives of laying off Sam Altman. The latter posted the following on X (former Twitter): 

“i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later.”

Greg Brockman, who resigned from the company after all, also took to X to express his shock of the board's decision, noting that: 

"We too are still trying to figure out exactly what happened."

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