Sam Altman back at OpenAI: The craziest five days in Silicon Valley history | The DeanBeat
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OpenAI has rotated through four CEOs in five days. I think that qualifies as the craziest five days in Silicon Valley history. Now fired CEO Sam Altman is back as the CEO of OpenAI again.
When the OpenAI board first fired Sam Altman as its CEO on the Friday before Thanksgiving, it might have thought the news would be quiet. It is, after all, one of the quietest news days of the business year. It named CTO Mira Murati as its new interim CEO.
But a storm erupted on social media. No one understood why the board would fire what seemed to be a popular CEO who helped trigger the generative AI revolution just a year ago with the release of ChatGPT. That made it seem like the board that fired Steve Jobs from Apple.
On its face, the OpenAI firing seemed to me like one of the worst board moves of all time. Of course, Jobs was pretty unpopular at the time he was fired by CEO John Sculley and Apple was struggling in the market. It took years for Jobs to gain back his role as CEO of Apple, after he had matured as a leader.
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Still, the comparison could be made that it made no sense to fire someone who was changing the world. Employees and other allies of Altman unsuccessfully tried to reinstate him over the weekend.
Then on Sunday the OpenAI board named Emmett Shear as its new interim CEO, immediately demoting Murati back to her earlier role. The board went through a few candidates before it found one that said yes, and then it
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