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On Friday local time, the board of OpenAI, a global star artificial intelligence company, was shaken by the resignations of CEO Sam Altman and chairman and president Greg Brockman. Chief technology officer Mira Murati will immediately take over as OpenAI’s interim CEO.

Later that night, Brockman detailed his and Altman’s dismissal by the board on the social platform X (formerly Twitter). Here is the full text of Brockman’s X tweets:

"Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today.

First, let us thank all the outstanding people we have worked with at OpenAI, our customers, investors, and everyone who has reached out to us.

We are also trying to figure out what happened, and here is what we know so far:

–Last night Sam received a text from Ilya (OpenAI’s co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever) asking him to talk on Friday. Sam joined the Google meeting, where all board members except me were present. Ilya told Sam that he was fired and that the news would go out soon.

–At 12:19 pm, I received a text from Ilya asking for a quick meeting. At 12:23 pm, Ilya sent a Google meeting link, where I was told that I would be removed from the board (but keep my company position as I was vital to the company), and that Sam was fired outright. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post.

–As far as we know, except for Mira Murati (Mira Murati) who knew the night before, the management team only learned about this recently.

It feels good to have your support, thank you, but don’t worry, we’ll be fine, and better things are coming."

Image source: Twitter screenshot

According to Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, OpenAI fired Altman because of a wide-ranging disagreement between the CEO and the board, especially Ilya Sutskever.

From right to left are Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, and Mira Murati. Image source: New York Times screenshot

Daily Economic News reporters found that OpenAI’s original board members included: Altman, Brockman, Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Helen Toner of Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. More importantly, Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever are all co-founders of OpenAI. Together with Mira Murati, they formed the core team of OpenAI, the “heroes” behind the popular ChatGPT-3.5.

According to OpenAI’s official statement, the majority of the board members are independent of each other, with different backgrounds and areas of expertise, jointly deciding and guiding the direction of OpenAI’s development. And from the board composition, Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever have the most direct connection with the company, while the other three have other social positions. The Financial Times also pointed out in its report that Altman and Brockman’s departure left Sutskever as the only remaining founder on OpenAI’s board.

From Brockman’s resignation following Altman’s, it can be seen that the two have a special relationship. According to foreign media reports, Brockman and Altman are similar, both belong to the “genius” type of business and technology talents, who have won international awards in mathematics, chemistry and other fields during their student career. He transferred from Harvard University to MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) after one year of study, and then dropped out in 2010 to join the online payment company Stripe. In 2013, Brockman became Stripe’s first chief technology officer and grew the company’s total number of employees from 5 to 205.

It is worth noting that Altman was working at Y Combinator when Brockman joined Stripe in 2010, and Y Combinator happened to be Stripe’s seed investor.

In 2015, Brockman, then Stripe’s chief technology officer, announced his departure and co-founded OpenAI with Tesla CEO Musk and Altman.

For Sutskever, Daily Economic News reporters did not find more intersections between him and Altman and Brockman in public data. He graduated from the University of Toronto in 2012 and then worked on research at Stanford University, the University of Toronto, and Google. He is a bona fide “top student”. He joined OpenAI in 2015 and became the company’s co-founder and chief scientist.

The current interim CEO Mira Murati’s resume is similar to Sutskever’s, mainly relying on “technology” to make a living. She previously served as OpenAI’s chief technology officer, responsible for the development of ChatGPT and AI drawing tool DALL-E, and was named by Time magazine as the “creator of ChatGPT”. She can be said to be the main contributor to the productization of OpenAI’s research results.

Bloomberg said that the focus of the disagreement between Sutskever and Altman was mainly on artificial intelligence safety, technology development speed and company commercialization.

The report said that Altman’s ambition was a major reason for the disagreement. According to a person familiar with the investment plan, Altman has been seeking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an artificial intelligence chip startup to compete with Nvidia’s processors. He also sought to invest billions of dollars from SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son to set up a new company, working with former Apple designer Jony Ive to produce hardware for artificial intelligence.

The person said that these new companies did not have the same governance model as OpenAI.