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An excerpt from the upcoming book \u201cThe Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future\u201d offers new details<\/a> about why OpenAI\u2019s board briefly fired CEO Sam Altman<\/a> back in 2023.<\/p>\n Written by Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey, the book claims the nonprofit\u2019s board members became increasingly concerned after learning about issues such as an OpenAI Startup Fund that was actually personally owned by Altman.<\/p>\n At the same time, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mira Murati were reportedly collecting evidence of what they saw as Altman\u2019s toxic and dishonest behavior, complete with screenshots from Murati\u2019s Slack channel. For example, Altman allegedly claimed the company\u2019s legal department said GPT-4 Turbo didn\u2019t need to be reviewed by the joint safety board, but the company\u2019s top lawyer denied saying that.<\/p>\n After Sutskever provided this evidence to board members, they moved to oust Altman and appoint Murati as interim CEO. But this quickly backfired, with OpenAI employees (including Sutskever and Murati) signing a letter demanding Altman\u2019s return \u2014 which he soon did, with Sutskever<\/a> and Murati<\/a> subsequently leaving to launch startups of their own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n