- A new report described in more detail why the OpenAI board initially pushed out Sam Altman.
- Altman reportedly tried to get a board member, Helen Toner, kicked out, but it backfired.
The New Yorker on Friday published a long article with many new details on what it said happened on the OpenAI board that led to the firing of CEO Sam Altman — a fiasco that the outlet said was internally referred to at Microsoft as the "Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck."
The writer just happened to have been spending the past six months working on a story focused on Microsoft's chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, and Mira Murati, who worked in that role at OpenAI. Then, suddenly, he was in the middle of the biggest tech-news scandal of the moment.
The New York Times previously reported the reason the board soured on Altman wasn't because it thought he was racing too fast toward artificial general intelligence but that he had tried to push out a 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.)