ChatGPT maker OpenAI ousts CEO Sam Altman

Nov 17 (Reuters) - ChatGPT maker OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman has been ousted after the board lost confidence in his ability to lead, the company said on Friday, sending shock waves across the tech industry.

OpenAI's Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati will serve as interim CEO, the company said, adding that it will conduct a formal search for a permanent CEO.

The announcement blindsided many employees who discovered the abrupt management shuffle from an internal announcement and the company's public facing blog.

"Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," OpenAI said in the blog without elaborating.

Backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft (MSFT.O), OpenAI kicked off the generative AI craze last November by releasing its ChatGPT chatbot, which became one of the world's fastest-growing software applications.

Altman, who ran Y Combinator, is a serial entrepreneur and investor, was the face of OpenAI and the wildly popular generative AI technology that can churn out human-like responses to queries as he toured the world this year.

Altman did not return requests for comment. OpenAI was not reachable for further comment.

"Microsoft remains committed to Mira and their team as we bring this next era of AI to our customers," a spokesperson for the software maker told Reuters on Friday.

While the impact of the change at OpenAI was not immediately clear, current fundraising prospects could be challenged. "In the short term it will impair OpenAI's ability to raise more capital. In the intermediate term it will be a non-issue," Thomas Hayes, chairman at hedge fund Great Hill Capital, said.

Jeffrey Dastin is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where he reports on the technology industry and artificial intelligence. He joined Reuters in 2014, originally writing about airlines and travel from the New York bureau. Dastin graduated from Yale University with a degree in history. He was part of a team that examined lobbying by Amazon.com around the world, for which he won a SOPA Award in 2022. Anna Tong is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where she reports on the technology industry. She joined Reuters in 2023 after working at the San Francisco Standard as a data editor. Tong previously worked at technology startups as a product manager and at Google where she worked in user insights and helped run a call center. Tong graduated from Harvard University. Contact:4152373211 Krystal reports on venture capital and startups for Reuters. She covers Silicon Valley and beyond through the lens of money and characters, with a focus on growth-stage startups, tech investments and AI. She has previously covered M&A for Reuters, breaking stories on Trump's SPAC and Elon Musk's Twitter financing. Previously, she reported on Amazon for Yahoo Finance, and her investigation of the company's retail practice was cited by lawmakers in Congress. Krystal started a career in journalism by writing about tech and politics in China. She has a master's degree from New York University, and enjoys a scoop of Matcha ice cream as much as getting a scoop at work.