My Highest Likelihood Explanation on Altman's Departure: Erosion of senior leadership experience on the OpenAI Board of Directors created a situation where factionalism over the proposed use of a recent breakthrough led to a political takeover. Over the last few years, board of directors at OpenAI lost a lot of its senior oversight due to conflicts of interest - Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Will Hurd. The only person left with significant leadership experience is Adam D'Angelo. After Will Hurd left, it was a split vote, 3v3: The likely factions were Ilya, Sam, Greg vs Adam, Tasha, Helen. Firing Sam was politics. It was not over performance, strategic leadership, or vision for the company. Rather, there was contention over the use of a breakthrough that drove a vote between safetyism and deployment speed. Why this was Factionalism - Sudden Ousting If this was planned, Sam would not be representing OpenAI at APEC events all week, OpenAI DevDay two weeks ago. If Microsoft knew or was involved, Satya Nadella would not have been on-stage with Sam at Dev Day. Microsoft claims they didn't have advance knowledge of this - they claim they knew about it one minute in advance. There clearly was not internal alignment on this decision either - @gdb just quit over this. What was the wedge issue? Just recently at APEC Sam announced he had witnessed the frontier of knowledge being pushed back four times in his experience at OpenAI, and the last time was recently - a couple weeks ago. Likely Greg and Sam wanted to build and deploy it in earnest, and Ilya didn't. Ilya had become lead of the "Superintelligence Alignment" division earlier this year. I would bet Ilya was the vote that broke the stalemate and led to the departure. Sam was kicked out over concerns he would move AI forward too fast by deploying a recent breakthrough. It's unlikely departure was related to anything regarding operations, cash burn, partnership-making ability, and so forth - OpenAI has blank-check status for ability to raise, they have huge cashflow, only a few hundred staff, are beyond doubt. Most importantly, the suddenness of the departure, lack of communication to Microsoft, and resignation of Greg Brockman all point to this being a sudden move by a board faction. Likely, the board felt that OpenAI was completely setup - in partnerships, funding, team, and direction, they could afford to push Sam out to regain control of of the direction and pace of roll-out of AI tools without threatening the security of OpenAI. Whatever the proximate justification behind the lack of being 'candid' - this is likely ultimately a split between safetyism and acceleration. Explanations that should be discarded Sam is extremely successful and intelligent, but also has a bulletproof reputation as an upstanding, intentional and pro-social person. He's also a billionaire several times over. The language used in the OpenAI disclosure, as well as comments by Eric Schmidt, seem to all point that this was a disagreement over intentions behind the use of AI tools, rather than an over-reach of power, monetary conflict of interest, or a personal scandal.