The Complete OpenAI & Sam Altman Timeline
What happened during the course of OpenAI firing Sam Altman.
People to Know
1 — Sam Altman (Founder & CEO, OpenAI)
2 — Greg Brockman (Co-Founder, President & Board Member, OpenAI)
3 — Ilya Sutskever (Co-Founder, Chief Scientist & Board Member, OpenAI)
4 — Mira Murati (CTO, OpenAI, Interim CEO #1)
5 — Satya Nadella (CEO, Microsoft, MSFT is largest shareholder of OpenAI)
6 — Adam D’Angelo (CEO, Quora & OpenAI Board Member)
7 — Emmett Shear (Interim CEO #2)
8 — Helen Toner (AI Researcher, OpenAI Board Member)
A short history of the OpenAI corporate structure
Thursday, Nov. 2nd
Sam was in the room, when the team demonstrated the next big improvement, possibly AGI. As he watched the latest advance, he was already planning for the next moves: the funds that would have to be raised, the resources that would have to planned for
Saturday, Nov. 4th
Ilya was unsettled. They’d reached a threshold of autonomy that was concerning, while the alignment team was still just adding capability instead of emotion, actual love for humanity. They needed more time to figure out the research pathway instead of hurrying to deploy new products.
Monday, Nov. 6th
OpenAI dev day is a big success with the announcement of new products and features for the API and the ability to create your own custom GPTs.
Tuesday, Nov. 7th
After dev day, Greg and Sam are in full on fund raising mode. They’re targeting 90 billion valuation, a 3x lift from 30 billion. OpenAI recruiters are already calling Google employees with 10–20 mil 4 year packages telling them if they join now they’ll make it in before the valuation increase.
Thursday, Nov. 9th
5:12 AM — Greg meets Emanuel Macron for a photo op, afterwards takes investor meetings in Paris. OpenAI is now at the sovereign wealth fund, European family money sized investment.
Monday, Nov. 13th
In an interview with the Financial Times in London, Sam confirms for the first time that work has begun on GPT5 and that he’s fundraising.
Tuesday, Nov. 14th
OpenAI pauses ChatGPT subscriptions, as they’re totally out of capacity for inference. Usage has spiked post dev day.
Thursday, Nov. 16th
At the APEC CEO summit, Sam confirms the Nov 4. next step up discovery.
Sam, yesterday: “4 times now in the history of OpenAI — the most recent time was just in the last couple of weeks — I’ve gotten to be in the room when we push the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward”
By this point Ilya is pissed and scared. The fundraising tour has caught him by surprise (“consistently candid”). The usage numbers have spiked and now they don’t have enough servers for the research team, meaning they have to fundraise again to support research. Events are starting to move beyond him.
7:40 PM — Sam Altman leaves an AI event in Oakland.
8:00 PM — Ilya messages Sam to schedule a discussion for noon the next day.
8:10 PM — Ilya discloses to Mira their intentions to remove Sam as CEO and proposes her as the interim CEO replacement.
Friday, Nov 17th
10:00 AM — Board meeting starts. Ilya produces 2, 23 year old staff engineers (rumor) to describe progress and dangers to the board. Turns into a battle when he says they shouldn’t be fundraising and shouldn’t be expanding and that Sam was out on tour without board agreement.
10:30 AM — Sam points out that as the CEO he has to stay ahead of the team and manage news flow in advance of the team’s needs. “We’re going to need more money for more data centers”
11:20 AM — Ilya has a fit. Things come to a head. A vote is taken. Sam is out. The board demotes Greg, who is not at the meeting as Sam is authorized to cast his vote.
12:00 PM — Sam joins a Google Meet where the OpenAI board, excluding Greg, is gathered. They inform him that he is being removed as CEO.
12:19 PM — Ilya sends a message to Greg inviting him to the ongoing meeting.
12:23 PM — Greg enters the meeting and is informed that he is no longer on the board but remains President.
12:26 PM — The board notifies Microsoft, OpenAI’s major investor, about the leadership change.
12:28 PM — OpenAI publicly announces Sam’s dismissal.
12:30 PM — Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, is blindsided and becomes furious at the OpenAI board for firing Sam Altman.
7:09 PM — Greg announces his departure from OpenAI, citing the board’s treatment of Sam as the reason.
Saturday, Nov 18th
1:00 PM — Sam starts conversations to secure funding for a new AI enterprise, with Greg likely to join him.
2:00 PM — Microsoft and other OpenAI backers put pressure on the board to reconsider their decision and reinstate Sam.
4:00 PM — The board is in talks about possibly reversing their decision to fire Sam and reinstating him as CEO.
4:10 PM — Sam is uncertain about returning to OpenAI and indicates that if he were to consider it, he would require significant changes in company governance.
5:35 PM — Altman says the board had agreed in principle to resign and to allow Altman and Brockman to return, but has since waffled — missing a key 5PM PT deadline by which many OpenAI staffers were set to resign. (source: Verge)
8:47 PM — Altman tweets “i love the openAI team so much”
8:50 PM — Dozens of employees tweet out a different colored heart in response to Altmans tweet. Looks to be a coordinated effort.
9:50 PM — The official ChatGPT Twitter account tweets out a white heart emoji. A clear symbol of defeat — showing the white flag? What do all the different colored hearts mean?!?!
10:25 PM — Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon told staffers in a memo Saturday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation, OpenAI is “optimistic” it can bring back Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and other key employees who departed in the wake of Altman’s sudden firing on Friday. Executives will be able to share another update by mid-morning tomorrow, Kwon said.
10:51 PM — Dozens of people, including OpenAI employees, left Sam Altman’s $27 million mansion in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood. Apparently they gathered to learn more about OpenAI’s future and Altman’s situation.
Sunday, Nov.19th
8:00 AM — The effort to bring Sam Altman back has encountered a challenge because the board has not agreed to resign. They have hesitations about who will succeed them.
8:01 AM — Bret Taylor is rumored to be a member of the new board, bringing his experience as the past CEO of Salesforce and as a former chairman of Twitter’s board.
8:02 AM — Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, is personally overseeing the negotiations involving OpenAI’s investors, its employees, and the board.
8:02 AM — Microsoft is still undecided about taking a place on the new OpenAI board.
8:05 AM — Sam Altman plans to visit OpenAI’s main office later today to meet with executives as they urge the board for his reinstatement.
8:05 AM — If the board consents to resign, Sam Altman could potentially be reinstated as CEO by the end of the day.
12:06 PM — Interim CEO Mira Murati went out of her way to say she and her leadership team was “first” to push the board to reinstate Altman and Brockman.
12:25 PM — Sam and Greg arrive at OpenAI HQ.
12:45 PM — Things are starting to heat up. A deliveryman with a dozen drinks from Boba Guys chain showed up on a motorbike to the OpenAI HQ with two bags. Another guy followed later with a half dozen more.
1:03 PM — Altman tweets a selfie pic of himself with an OpenAI guest badge saying “first and last time i ever wear one of these”.
1:22 PM — Sam Altman is back in the building and has set another 5pm deadline with OpenAI’s board to reach a deal today (source: The Verge)
3:57 PM — Bloomberg reports “Legal issues really slowing things down. For Sam Altman to come back, the board would have to issue a statement absolving him of wrongdoing. But if they do, that opens them up to legal liability. It’s unclear what happens if the deadline is passed, but if you’re a MSFT shareholder you want them to figure this out by market open! (Source: Emily Chang)
4:03 PM — Microsoft considering taking a seat on OpenAI’s board, potentially as a non-voting board observer.
5:48 PM — Here are the OpenAI board candidates that have been discussed or proposed by people close to the co, per @aaronpholmes & @KateClarkTweets with Microsoft also eyeing a seat. Bret Taylor, Marisa Mayer, Brian Chesky, Roelof Botha, Reid Hoffman, Sheryl Sandberg.
8:16 PM — Interim CEO Mura Murati aims to re-hire Altman, Brockman after exits. Board members are simultaneously seeking a different CEO. (Source: Bloomberg)
8:58 PM — Ilya Sutskever told staff Sunday night that Sam Altman won’t return as CEO. Former Twitch CEO, Emmet Shear taking over as interim CEO.
9:15 PM — So, here’s what happened at OpenAl tonight. Mira planned to hire Sam and Greg back. She turned Team Sam over the past couple of days. Idea was to force the board to fire everyone, which they figured the board would not do. Board went into total silence. Found their own CEO, Emmett Shear. It was a game of chicken until the very end. Only constant was board talking to just about no one. Microsoft is NOT pleased about the outcome.
9:00 PM-11:50 PM — As we understand it, Satya pitched to Sam and Greg that it would be easier for them to just join Microsoft and use their resources to get started immediately, rather than start a newco. Sam will poach the best talent from OpenAI to their special team, get started working on GPT5 or whatever it is they wanted, have access to OpenAI’s tech through Microsoft, and they now have the legal defense of Microsoft behind them if OpenAI tries to litigate. This may not be the permanent move, but it makes sense as a next one. OpenAI really shot themselves in the foot, they will likely fizzle out over the next several years.
11:53 PM — Satya Nadella tweets “We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them. And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”
11:58PM — Sam Altman tweets in response to Satya “the mission continues”
Monday, Nov. 20th
12:24 AM — Satya tweets again, this time in response to Altman’s “the mission continues” tweet.
1:01 AM — Newly appointed interim CEO of OpenAI Emmett Shear sends lengthy tweet about his decision to join OpenAI.
1:17 AM — Greg Brockman tweets, “We are going to build something new & it will be incredible.
2:06 AM — Mira Murati and hundreds of OpenAI employees all tweet out in solidarity “OpenAI is nothing without its people”
2:10 AM — One of OpenAI’s own researchers tweets:
5:15 AM — Illya Sutskever tweets, “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.
5:35 AM — 505 of 700 OpenAI employees sign a letter telling the board to resign. Oddly, Ilya Sutskever is on the list.
7:53 AM — New in The Information Opinion by @vkhosla, the first venture investor in OpenAI. “OpenAI’s board members’ religion of “effective altruism” and its misapplication could have set back the world’s path to the tremendous benefits of AI.” (Source: The Information)
7:59 AM — “A note to @OpenAI developers 🫶:
I wanted to express my appreciation for all the warm, thoughtful, and supportive messages I got and I’ve seen posted across the community.
Despite a moment of uncertainty, our commitment to developers remained steadfast.
In the meantime, please know that we are continuing to prioritize stability and security of our systems. Our engineering team remains on-call and actively monitoring our services.
In all events, our commitment remains to our customers and our mission. Thank you for your continued trust.”
8:12 AM — About 650 / 770 signed at this moment. As people start waking up, more will come. All the efforts started after 1:30 AM, 500+ signed within two hours.
9:00 AM — Microsoft releases “Microsoft 365 Copilot” available for users to sign up https://copilot.microsoft.com/
9:50 AM — 700 of 770 OpenAI employees saying they will go now.
10:19 AM — Altman cryptically tweets “the openai leadership team, particularly mira brad and jason but really all of them, have been doing an incredible job through this that will be in the history books. incredibly proud of them.”
10:27 AM — Altman tweets again “we have more unity and commitment and focus than ever before. we are all going to work together some way or other, and i’m so excited. one team, one mission.”
10:40 AM — Greg Brockman tweets in response to Altman “💯 Cannot overstate the level of pride & respect I feel for @miramurati @bradlightcap
@jasonkwon and the rest of the leadership team for their response to this crisis. One team, one mission.”
10:40 AM — Founders and developers are getting worried about their companies built on top of OpenAI. COO of OpenAI, Brad Lightcap tweets out in response to assure everyone that their customers are of the highest priority and will ensure their platform is operational.
11:01 AM — Sam Altman and Greg Brockman’s move to Microsoft isn’t a done deal. They are still plotting a return to OpenAI. Pressure is on the board to still resign gracefully after the flipping of Ilya Sutskever last night. Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO.
Two more board members must change their minds for Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to return.
11:35 AM — More: OpenAI employees at the company’s SF HQ refused to attend an all hands scheduled with new CEO Emmett Shear on Sunday They are currently working to maintain the service with the hope that the board will relent under threat of mass resignation. It’s a “holding pattern.”
11:39 AM — Altman tweet reassuring that him and CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella are focused on OpenAI customers.
12:22 PM — OpenAI’s first venture capital backer, Vinod Khosla, publicly calling for the resignation of OpenAI’s new CEO on day 1.
12:39 PM — 726 employees have now confirmed they will leave with Sam if he and Greg are not reinstated.
12:54 PM — 728 of the 778 have signed.
1:37 PM — 733 have signed (95%).
1:40 PM — Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce tweets that Salesforce “will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese.” Blood is in the water.
2:31 PM — Benioff gets ROASTED ☠️😂
2:30 PM — Emily Chang will interview Satya Nadella live on Bloomberg at 3PM PST. Watch live 👉 https://www.bloomberg.com/live
2:41 PM — CEO of EightSleep (which tracks your sleep data), tweets out that they “checked the data and last night, SF saw a spike in low-quality sleep. There was a 27% increase in people getting under 5 hours of sleep. We need to fix this.”
3:00 PM — Satya Nadella interview
3:17 PM — He made clear that it’s very possible Altman could go back to OpenAI, as we first reported he’s still willing to do today. He could not answer @emilychangtv’s question about who will be CEO of OpenAI tomorrow “We will definitely want some governance changes”, “Surprises are bad”.
He’s covering big-time -> “Either way, we’ll be working with Sam…”
(Subplot: when the dust settles, Satya will have vengeance on *someone* for having to do so much press)
3:22 PM — What we know after today’s CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella’s interview with Bloomberg TV about situation with OpenAI and Microsoft:
1) He said they have all IP and legal stuff to succeed with Sam and the team if they join Microsoft.
2) He doesn’t know why the board fired Sam Altman
3) He repeated multiple times that wherever Sam goes Microsoft will work with him and the team
4) There’s no 100% certainty if Sam Altman returns to OpenAI or joins Microsoft.
5) Satya mentioned that they are leaders not only LLMs (with OpenAI) but also SLMs (small language models)
6) Satya mentioned that they have a lot of research and innovation at Microsoft in AI
Conclusion: we still don’t know what happens with OpenAI, Sam, Greg and the team as of Monday evening.
3:26 PM — 743 of the 778 have signed… >95% of the company.
4:50 PM — Adam D’Angelo coup confirmed????? OpenAI employee retweets post saying this was all about *Poe* (wtf???)
5:33 PM — New from @steph_palazzolo: Shortly after firing Altman, OpenAI’s board approached Dario Amodei, the co-founder and CEO of rival Anthropic, about a potential merger.
5:53 PM —Interesting detail — Sutskever flipped his position following intense deliberations with OpenAI employees as well as an emotionally charged conversation with Brockman’s wife, Anna Brockman, at the company’s offices, during which she cried and pleaded with him to change his mind, according to people familiar with the matter.
5:57 PM — It looks like @eshear was not the OpenAI board’s first pick as CEO. @natfriedman, former CEO of GitHub, and @alexandr_wang CEO of Scale AI we’re both offered the position before him, but declined the offers.
5:58 PM — Satya sits down with Kara Swisher for a 30-min podcast to talk everything OpenAI. He says, “We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything.” 😈
6:46 PM — From the Satya & Kara Swisher podcast interview, Satya says “We’re never going to get back into a situation where we’re surprised like this again.”
7:09 PM — The board said Sam was not consistently candid in his communications with the board. @ilyasut gave 2 explanations to employees:
1) Sam gave 2 people at OpenAI the same project.
2) he allegedly gave 2 board members different opinions about a member of personnel
9:24 PM — Per internal memo, OpenAI is still involved in “intense discussions” with the board, Sam Altman, Emmett Shear to unify company. No resolution this evening. Discussions will resume tmrw morning “when everyone’s had a little more sleep,”.
10:03 PM — everyone can go to sleep: discussions to reunify OpenAI will resume in the morning, exec tells employees
“OpenAI executives plan to continue discussions with ousted CEO Sam Altman, interim CEO Emmett Shear and the startup’s board of directors on Tuesday morning as they work to “reunify” the company, OpenAI vice president of global affairs Anna Makanju told employees in a memo on Monday night, according to people with knowledge of the situation.”
Tuesday, Nov. 21st
6:31 AM — CTO of Microsoft tweets out “To my partners at OpenAI: We have seen your petition and appreciate your desire potentially to join Sam Altman at Microsoft’s new AI Research Lab. Know that if needed, you have a role at Microsoft that matches your compensation and advances our collective mission.”
7:48 AM — Possible reasons for OpenAI’s board’s reasoning to this whole reason (unconfirmed — this is speculation):
9:47 AM — @Sama and the OpenAI board are now in talks for his possible return, specifically he’s speaking with @adamdangelo
- one scenario, transition board where Sam would serve as director
- meantime @eshear has told folks he will leave if the board can’t provide evidence of wrongdoing
10:10 AM — We’re told Altman still wants to return to OpenAI and continues to negotiate with the board today. We are told everyone, including the board, is trying to be reasonable, and put OpenAI back together.
9:49 AM — Interim CEO Emmett Shear says he will resign if the OpenAI board can’t provide evidence of why they fired Sam Altman.
10:38 AM — Thoughts about the board’s possible reasoning for this whole thing:
11:24 AM — Sam Altman looks to be pulling off the “business maneuver of the century.”
11:38 AM — New information about board member and CEO of Quora, Adam D’Angelo.
12:17 PM — Quote from April, 2017 of Sam Altman talking about Adam D’Angelo in a blog post — https://blog.samaltman.com/quora
12:43 PM — OpenAI tweets “ChatGPT with voice is now available to all free users. Download the app on your phone and tap the headphones icon to start a conversation.”
1:00 PM — One of the main questions from this entire ordeal is — Why is OpenAI structured that way?
“Though no one knows precisely what happened, a common theory is that Altman’s for-profit efforts became at odds with the mission-driven nonprofit board.” (Techcrunch)
1:08 PM — Looks like it’s Team Sam, who know has a ton of people on his side in addition to all of the employees vs. Team Board which has Adam D’Angelo and Emmett Shear.
1:11 PM — Satya and Microsoft basically told them to figure it out internally and to not bother him anymore.
2:34 PM — World wide outages for ChatGPT and OpenAI API are being reported.
2:48 PM — Elon Musk posts a tweet “This letter about OpenAI was just sent to me. These seem like concerns worth investigating.”
The tweet contains a link to a Github document of the following.
(Take this with a HUGE piece of salt — I only added it in here to have an accurate account of what everyone is talking about at the time.)
3:09 PM — ChatGPT and OpenAI API are still down.
3:44 PM — The reasons why this letter is either BS, Fake, a Hit Job, PR, or any other nefarious possibilities is:
3:45 PM — The original Github link posted by Musk is taken down.
4:32 PM — New Info!
- Sam was trying to push Helen out for her academic paper critical of OAI; Ilya sided with her to push out Sam
- The Anthropic folks had also tried to push Sam out
- There are 6 board members bc of disagreement on who to add
- Helen ok to destroy OAI for the mission
4:41 PM — OpenAI Board Drama: OpenAI’s fired CEO Sam Altman had a disagreement with board member Helen Toner, an AI researcher and OpenAI board member, in the weeks leading up to the board’s firing.
4:44 PM — Here is Helen Toner’s paper about AI Safety and de-acceleration.
It’s 66 pages long, asking “How can policymakers credibly reveal and assess intentions in the field of artificial intelligence?” As one of several case studies, it compares the approaches OpenAI and Anthropic took to signal their commitment to AI safety around their latest LLM’s.
4:54 PM — TL;DR — Helen Toner wrote a paper which seemed to criticize OpenAI while praising their competitor Anthropic. Sam Altman, after reading this emailed the team, reprimanding Toner saying that it was dangerous to the company as “any amount of criticism from a board member carries a lot of weight.”
NYT article here: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/21/technology/openai-altman-board-fight.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
Research paper here (criticism starting on page 29): https://cset.georgetown.edu/wp-content/uploads/CSET-Decoding-Intentions.pdf
5:03 PM — Going through all the new documentation it seems the board may not have been aligned after all.
5:17 PM — “OpenAI employees: did you sign the petition out of fear?” (This has since been refuted by other employees as being not true — to their knowledge)
6:04 PM — “The board’s mission is to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that “benefits all humanity,” and if the company was destroyed, she said, that mission would be fulfilled.” — Helen Toner
This is the most insane quote 🤯
6:37PM — More information coming out confirming the internal conflict between Sam and Helen.
6:52 PM — Research scientist at OpenAI Shengjia Zhao states:
10:03 PM — OpenAI tweets that they have reached an agreement to bring Sam Altman back as CEO.
10:08 PM — Sam Altman tweets confirming the news to return to OpenAI.
10:20 PM — Former interim Emmett Shear tweets that he is pleased with the outcome of events.
10:45 PM — More context about the negotiations — looks like Sam had to give up his board seat. It’s not all roses — Altman agreed to an internal probe and neither he nor Greg Brockman are directors. They also have to live with Adam D’Angelo as a director.
11:41 PM — Greg Brockman tweets out a selfie with the OpenAI team.
Wednesday, Nov. 22nd
4:00 AM — It’s finally over!!!
7:04 AM — Emmett Shear tweeted a hilarious message saying that he has beat the record of shortest time as a CEO.
7:51 AM — Impressive information about new board member, Bret Taylor.
8:00 AM — Solidarity of employees
8:02 AM — The whole OpenAI debacle is powered by chicken nuggets.
9:42 AM — Satya tweets again confirming the decision and saying how thankful he is that everyone was resolved by Thanksgiving.
9:46 AM — Microsoft’s internal memo about the chaos at OpenAI.
3:17 PM — Back to work 💪
2:53 PM —Information comes out about a new breakthrough in AI development from OpenAI. The project is named Q* (pronounced Q-Star) — this could also be a code name for GPT-5.
3:46 PM — Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve certain mathematical problems. Though only performing math on the level of grade-school students, acing such tests made researchers very optimistic about Q*’s future success.”
