OpenAI's Sam Altman opens up about shock firing
Altman shares his feelings after being reinstated as CEO at the AI startup he co-founded
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After being reinstated as CEO of OpenAI following his shocking termination, Sam Altman is sharing what it felt like when he was terminated by the former board of the artificial intelligence startup he co-founded.
The AI guru opened up about the experience during a sit-down with Trevor Noah on the comedian's "What Now?" podcast, when the host asked Altman where he was and what he was going through on a personal level when he learned he was fired.
Altman revealed that when he received the call that he had been let go from OpenAI on Nov. 17, he was in a hotel room in Las Vegas, where he was in town for the Formula 1 Grand Prix. But he ended up not watching any races that weekend.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI participates in the "Charting the Path Forward: The Future of Artificial Intelligence" at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Leaders' Week in San Francisco, California, on November 16, 2023. He was fired by the for (ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS / AFP / Getty Images)
"It felt like a dream," Altman told Noah. "I was confused. It was chaotic. It did not feel real. It was obviously…painful. But confusion was just the dominant emotion at that point. It was like I was just in a fog, in a haze."
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Altman said he did not understand what was happening and felt the termination was handed down in "this unprecedentedly, in my opinion, crazy way."
Within the next half hour after getting the call, he said, he received so many messages that the nonstop notifications made his smartphone unusable, and it froze up and stopped working for a while. He said "everyone" was calling, including Microsoft.
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Eventually, Altman said, he collected himself, and told himself he could move on and work on AGI (advanced general intelligence) somehow. Then he started receiving messages from people saying they want to come work with him wherever he goes, but at that point, returning to OpenAI was not in his mind at all. He said he was still trying to be supportive of OpenAI, while trying to figure out what was happening.
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Altman said he then flew back to California to meet with some people and was very focused on moving forward at that point. He said he couldn't sleep that first night, and it was sort of "a crazy weekend from there."
Noah noted that Altman said nothing disparaging against OpenAI after being fired, and said it appears the dismissal took a toll on him.
"I don't think it's anything I won't bounce back from, but I think it'd be impossible to go through this and not have it take a toll on you," Altman replied. "That'd be really…really strange."
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The now-reinstated CEO, whose company developed ChatGPT, said AGI and his family are the two main things he cares about, but he also cares so much about OpenAI and its people, users, shareholders, and everything it has built. He called the firing "unbelievably painful."
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"The only comparable set of life experience I had – and that one was of course much worse – was when my dad died," Altman said, which was also "a very sudden thing."
"In that case, I felt like I had a little bit of time to just really feel it all, but then there was so much to do, it was so unexpected that I had to pick up the pieces of his life for a little while. And it wasn't until like a week after that, that I really got a moment to just catch my breath and be like, holy s---, I can't believe this happened," he recalled. "So that was much worse, but there's echoes of that same thing here."
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As for how he feels now, Altman told Noah, "I'm still a little bit in shock and a little bit just trying to pick up the pieces, you know. As I have time to sit and process this all, I'll have a lot more feelings about it."