Timothy L. O'Brien, Columnist

Sam Altman's Leadership of OpenAI Is All Too Human

A brave new industry is in play. So is corporate governance.

December 5, 2023 at 10:00 AM UTC

Timothy L. O'Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”

Did Sam Altman win his power struggle at OpenAI?
Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg

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OpenAI, which you may have heard a lot about lately, is the company that developed ChatGPT, a wildly popular AI bot that you most certainly have heard of. OpenAI’s board of directors recently purged the company’s CEO, Sam Altman. High drama ensued. And various stakeholders — employees, investors, Microsoft — saw to it that Altman was reinstated. The board itself then faced a purge. Oh, my.