It’s been a ridiculous week at OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT and perhaps the world’s most well-known artificial intelligence company. Last Friday, OpenAI’s then-and-now CEO Sam Altman was fired by OpenAI’s board for a failure to be “consistently candid in his communications with the board”. This was rather shocking, and set off a ridiculous chain of events, as well as a flurry of reporting. It all culminated with Altman returning as OpenAI’s CEO, and most of the company’s board being replaced.
This was widely covered as it unfolded, but if you missed it, the New York Times has a decent summary of the chaos.1 For my part, the thing I like best is that fact that three different people served as CEO of OpenAI in the span of less than a week.
The OpenAI CEO Lookup Table for November 2023
November 1 – November 17: Sam Altman
November 17 – November 19: Mira Murati
November 19 – November 22: Emmett Shear
November 22 – November 30: Sam Altman
Ideally, this table would include a minute-by-minute accounting, but those details are simply not available. In fact, even the dates are approximate, as there seems to be some disagreement over when exactly the tenures of Murati and Shear began and ended. I pity the poor payroll administrator who has to figure all of this out.
Also, please note that there are still almost seven days left in November. There’s easily time to cram in two, three, or even four more interim CEOs. Rest assured, updates to this post will be made as needed.
Footnotes:
Currently, there’s even a Wikipedia page devoted solely for the “Removal of Sam Altman from OpenAI”, but it’s nominated for deletion.↩︎
