The fear and tension that led to Sam Altman’s ouster at OpenAI

San Francisco: Over the past year, Sam Altman led OpenAI to the adult table of the technology industry. Thanks to its hugely popular ChatGPT chatbot, the San Francisco startup was at the center of an artificial intelligence boom, and Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, had become one of the most recognisable people in tech.

But that success raised tensions inside the company. Ilya Sutskever, a respected AI researcher who co-founded OpenAI with Altman and nine other people, was increasingly worried that OpenAI’s technology could be dangerous and that Altman was not paying enough attention to that risk, according to three people familiar with his thinking. Sutskever, a member of the company’s board of directors, also objected to what he saw as his diminished role in the company, according to two of the people.