GoKawiilis The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.
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The week leading up to Thanksgiving 2023 was the AI industry’s biggest soap opera moment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was abruptly ousted from his role at the ChatGPT-maker. The explanation? That Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” Now, via witness testimony and trial exhibits in Musk v. Altman, the public is getting a concrete look behind the scenes of that dramatic weekend for the first time, much of it centered on former CTO Mira Murati.
It was a unique situation in that the rollercoaster of a power play — which seemed to change every hour — took place, in many ways, publicly. The board’s strikingly vague blog post announcing Altman’s ouster was posted on OpenAI’s website, immediately sparking a laundry list of conspiracy theories bandied about on X. (It turned out that the impetus had allegedly been a pattern of lying or omission by Altman, whether about OpenAI’s safety processes, about his own ownership stake in OpenAI’s startup fund, or about the release of certain tools or features like ChatGPT.) Other OpenAI executives and AI industry leaders made public statements in support of Altman. An online campaign began among hundreds of OpenAI employees whether they posted a heart if they supported Altman’s reinstatement, and many posted the phrase, “OpenAI is nothing without its people.” Rumors swirled as countless onlookers waited with bated breath for any new kernel of information. (I covered the whole thing from a backpacking trip in Patagonia, armed with only an iPhone notes app (and no laptop).)
Throughout it all, one unassuming character seemed to be everywhere at once: OpenAI CTO Mira Murati. At first, she was made interim CEO, before immediately ceding the position to outsider Emmett Shear. Within days, Altman was back at the helm of the company, and the board that had come together to remove him was largely gone.
Murati had publicly supported Altman’s reinstatement and posted online in favor of him returning to his role at the company. But over time, reports surfaced that she had had a significant hand in his ouster. She had, by some accounts, more or less started the internal conversation about concerns surrounding Altman and funneled a significant amount of information — including screenshots, documentation of text messages, and allegations of mismanagement during Altman’s time at Y Combinator — to cofounder Ilya Sutskever, who then took his concerns to the OpenAI board in the form of a 52-page memo. In testimony this week, former board member Helen Toner said that Murati and Sutskever’s concerns had materially advanced the board’s own, relating to a pattern of deceit, Altman’s “resistance” of board oversight, and his “manipulation” of board processes and management problems.
On November 16, 2023, four members of OpenAI’s board of directors — Toner, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D’Angelo, and Tasha McCauley — unanimously signed a document terminating Altman’s employment with OpenAI and naming Murati the new interim CEO.
Though Murati had, by many accounts, played an integral part in the entire lead-up to Altman’s ouster, Murati almost immediately seemed to switch her support to Altman.
In 78 text messages exchanged over a 14-hour period, between Sunday early evening and Monday morning, Murati and Altman talked at length about whether his reinstatement would be possible and what would happen next. Altman said that D’Angelo, a board member, was “trying to get the board to agree to a configuration” but that Altman and Nadella had told D’Angelo that that “doesn’t work and that [they] need to start preparing for plan b.”
Around 2:30am on Monday morning, Altman asked, “can you indicate directionally good or bad? satya and others anxious.”
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