Sam Altman: The extraordinary firing of an AI superstar

On Friday, Sam Altman – one of the brightest stars of the booming artificial intelligence industry, a man who for many had become the go-to spokesperson for AI – was unceremoniously dumped from the company he co-founded, a firm that introduced many people directly to the concept for the first time.

Yes, AI has been in our lives for ages – curating our social media feeds, recommending movies on video streaming platforms, playing a hand in calculating our insurance premiums.

But until the arrival of the AI chatbot ChatGPT, most people had never actually spoken to it before – or had it talk back.

Artificial intelligence is an incredibly powerful technology. It sounds like a bad movie plot but plenty of experts seriously say it could either save the world or destroy it.

They are high stakes – and Mr Altman is one of relatively few people with that future in his hands.

His dismissal from OpenAI, the company behind the ChatGPT bot, was as sudden as it was dramatic. It’s fair to say my phone blew up when the news broke, as the tech community and journalists scrambled to make sense of it all.

In a statement, his board of directors said they believed he had not been “consistently candid in communications” with them, and as a result they had “lost confidence” in his leadership.

Reading between the lines, this suggests there was something he either had or had not told them – and somehow he’s been caught out. The wording is so powerful, it almost sounds personal.

There are swirling rumours but, so far, no further facts.

It’s not unknown in tech firms for a toxic working culture to lead to the boss’s downfall – but there has been no grumblings about that in the case of OpenAI.

In October it was set to be valued at $80bn (£64bn) – so there’s no apparent cash problem.