OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the ChatGPT maker was like a house on fire following his brief ouster from the company.
Altman told Bloomberg in an interview published Sunday that he was left with a "complete mess on my hands" after being reinstated as CEO.
On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board said in a statement it was removing Altman because he "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board."
The board, however, didn't provide further details about Altman's firing. Just five days later, after OpenAI's employees protested the board's decision, Altman was reinstated as CEO.
"And it got worse every day. It was like another government investigation, another old board member leaking fake news to the press," Altman told Bloomberg.
"And all those people that I feel like really fucked me and fucked the company were gone, and now I had to clean up their mess," he added.
Altman did not specify which board member he was referring to.
In November, OpenAI's board consisted of six people: Altman, fellow cofounders Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, AI researcher Helen Toner, and Tasha McCauley, an entrepreneur and researcher at the RAND Corporation. Sutskever, D'Angelo, Toner, and McCauley had voted for Altman's removal.
D'Angelo was the only one of the four to remain on OpenAI's board following Altman's return as CEO. Sutskever left his position as OpenAI's chief scientist in May.
"It was just a crazy thing to have to go through and then have no time to recover, because the house was on fire," Altman told Bloomberg.
When approached for comment, OpenAI told Business Insider that it had nothing further to add to Altman's interview.
OpenAI saw multiple exits in its leadership ranks following Altman's return as CEO.
Sutskever's co-lead for OpenAI's superalignment team, Jan Leike, left his post at the same time Sutskever did and joined the company's rival Anthropic.
Then, in August, the company's cofounder and head of its alignment science efforts, John Schulman, left OpenAI to join Anthropic.
In September, Mira Murati, the company's chief technology officer, also announced her departure.
OpenAI is in talks with California's attorney general's office about becoming a for-profit entity, Bloomberg separately reported. The company was launched as a nonprofit research organization in 2015.
In October, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion funding round, valuing it at $157 billion.
