Speculations about why
Sam Altman
was ousted from
OpenAI
in November 2023 could finally be put to rest. Former OpenAI board members Helen Toner, in an interview on The Ted AI Show podcast, have made striking revelations that caused the company’s board members to expel Altman.
Altman accused of ‘Withholding information’, ‘misrepresenting things’
During the interview, Toner revealed that Atlman had allegedly lied to OpenAI’s board on several occasions.
She alleged that Altman was ‘withholding information’ from the board and misrepresented things that were happening at the company for years.
Full video of the interview has been shared by Helen Toner in a post on X. Here’s the link
She told the interviewer that she was personally targeted by the CEO after she published a research paper that didn’t go well with him. “Sam started lying to other board members in order to try and push me off the board,” she said during the interview.
Another reason as to why the board stopped trusting Altmans was because he allegedly did not inform them about owning the OpenAI startup fund. "Sam didn't inform the board that he owned the OpenAI startup fund, even though he constantly was claiming to be an independent board member with no financial interest in the company," she said.
Toner cites the incident of the board coming to know about the release of
ChatGPT
via Twitter, now X, as an example of how the board didn’t have real oversight over OpenAI. “..when ChatGPT came out November 2022, the board was not informed in advance. We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter,” Toner said.
In the interview, she said that once it was decided to bring in a new CEO, board members fel that the only way to do this was going behind his back. “It was very clear to all of us that as soon as Sam had any inkling that we might do something that went against him, he would pull out all the stops, do everything in his power to undermine the board, to prevent us from even getting to the point of being able to fire him,” Toner said.
However, she did not reveal details of what happened at the company after Altman’s ousting.
…he doesn’t exactly have a glowing trail of reference: Toner
“And I guess the last thing I would say about this is that this actually isn’t a new problem for Sam. And if you look at some of the reporting that has come out since November. It’s come out that he was actually fired from his previous job at Y Combinator, which was hushed up at the time. And then at, you know, his job before that, which was his only other job in Silicon Valley, his startup Loopt, apparently the management team went to the board there twice and asked the board to fire him for what they called deceptive and chaotic behavior. If you actually look at his track record, he doesn’t exactly have a glowing trail of references. This wasn’t a problem specific to the personalities on the board, as much as he would love to portray it that way,” she said in the interview.
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