Sam Altman has been fired as CEO of OpenAI, the company announced on Friday.

“Mr. 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,” the company said in its blog post. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

Chief technology officer Mira Murati will be the interim CEO. The company will be conducting a search for the permanent CEO successor. When contacted by The Verge, OpenAI’s communications department declined to comment beyond the blog post.

This is an extremely sudden turn of events. as Altman has largely been the face of OpenAI, which arguably kickstarted the current AI arms race with last year’s hugely-popular ChatGPT. Just last week, Altman keynoted at the company’s DevDay conference, where it announced a suite of major new updates to compete with other big tech companies like Microsoft and Google. Altman also spoke at Thursday’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference.

Altman was a co-founder of OpenAI and initially served as a co-chair of the company alongside Elon Musk. Musk left in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla.

OpenAI also announced that co-founder Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board, though Brockman will remain at the company.

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Source: The Verge Sam Altman fired as CEO of OpenAI