Silicon Valley leaders are calling Sam Altman’s firing the biggest tech scandal since Apple fired Steve Jobs—but the leading theory about the OpenAI drama tells a different story
2 min read
Apple lost its founder, 30-year-old Steve Jobs, in 1985, a famous moment in tech and business history, as the maker of the Macintosh parted ways with the face of personal computing, over a decade before their fateful reunion, the iPod, the iPhone, the $1 trillion valuation and all that. Now AI has its own “Steve Jobs: Act One” moment, as Sam Altman, the 38-year-old face of the AI boom, has been fired by OpenAI’s board for the unexplained sin of being “not consistently candid in his communications.” Act Two is sure to follow, but, just like Jobs’ expulsion from the company he cofounded nearly four decades ago, the exact reasons for the firing are still shrouded in mystery.
Tech watchers are drawing the comparison. “What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs,” legendary angel investor Ron Conway posted on X late on Friday. “It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI,” Conway said.
Bloomberg writer Ashlee Vance made the same comparison, posting: “This is like Apple firing Steve Jobs only they’re doing it after the iPhone has become the best selling computer in history.”
A day after Altman’s sudden dismissal, it remains a mystery why the most important company in the AI-driven “fourth industrial revolution” abruptly dismissed its superstar CEO. Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 after running the prestigious tech incubator Y Combinator, has presided over the startup as its ChatGPT bot surged to popularity. Unusually for a tech founder, Altman had no equity stake in OpenAI and so didn’t exercise the type of control other founders like Mark Zuckerberg are known to do; unlike other tech leaders, Altman’s fame came not from his engineering brilliance but from his ability to raise large amounts of money and his bets on ambitious, world-changing…
Nick Lichtenberg, Irina Ivanova
2023-11-18 17:19:31
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