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Former OpenAI director details ousting of CEO Sam Altman, says board learned of ChatGPT launch on Twitter

  • Helen Toner says board members did not know about the 2022 launch of ChatGPT until they saw an announcement on Twitter
  • She also accused Altman of giving the board inaccurate information about OpenAI’s formal safety processes

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A former OpenAI director says the board only learned about the launch of ChatGPT when it was announced on Twitter. Photo: AP Photo
Bloomberg
Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member, said that the board did not know about the company’s 2022 launch of its chatbot ChatGPT until afterward – and only found out about it on Twitter.

In a podcast called The TED AI Show, Toner gave her fullest account to date of the events that prompted her and other board members to fire Sam Altman in November of last year.

In the days that followed chief executive officer Sam Altman’s sudden ousting, employees threatened to quit, Altman was reinstated, and Toner and other directors left the board.

“When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance about that,” Toner said on the podcast. “We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter.”

The company’s launch of ChatGPT was relatively quiet: OpenAI simply called the chatbot an artificial intelligence (AI) model that “interacts in a conversational way”. But over the following days and weeks, ChatGPT’s ability to generate human-sounding text made it a massive hit, and helped pave the way for the current boom in AI.

OpenAI did not immediately provide a comment.

In a statement provided to the TED podcast, OpenAI’s current board chief, Bret Taylor said, “We are disappointed that Ms. Toner continues to revisit these issues.”

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