Sam Altman always insisted that he wasn’t the most important
person at OpenAI despite being its CEO. As he traveled the
world this year meeting world leaders—the world’s unofficial
ambassador of AI—Altman would soft-pedal his role, even as he
stole glances at his phone to keep up with what was happening
in OpenAI’s luxe San Francisco offices.

“We have an incredibly great team here that can do a lot of
things, so mostly, I defer to them,” he told me in May when I
asked him how the company ran in his absence. “But some
things only a CEO can do—some HR thing of the moment, or
you have to kill some project, or something with a major
partner.” Those items would accumulate on his phone and at
the end of the day he’d bat out responses. Then he would go
back to speechifying, meeting developers, and taking tea with
prime ministers.

On Friday, the mother of all “HR things of the moment” hit Sam
Altman like a Cybertruck. Around midday, according to OpenAI
cofounder and Altman ally Greg Brockman, the board of
directors of the nonprofit that governs the AI company suddenly
fired its CEO. A detail-free statement more worthy of a
company called ClosedAI said that the directors “concluded that
he was not consistently candid in his communications with the
board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” An
internal memo to OpenAI staff, first reported by Axios, later said
the move wasn’t a “response to malfeasance” but offered little
further explanation.

It gradually leaked out that Altman’s exit was supported by chief
scientist Ilya Sutskever and CTO Mura Murati, who became
interim CEO. Before Friday night was through, Brockman,
OpenAI’s president, had quit the company and reports came
that several other key employees were leaving, too.

With more shoes still to drop than a Nike clearance sale, it’s too
soon to know precisely what’s next for OpenAI. But already the
apparent boardroom coup stands with Apple’s 1985 dismissal of
Steve Jobs as the most shocking execution in Silicon Valley
history. From studying OpenAI closely this year for WIRED’s
October cover story, I can say some things about the impact of
Altman’s loss.

First, it’s important to remember that OpenAI was founded by
Altman and Elon Musk to fulfill a mission. “The organization is
trying to develop a human-positive AI. And because it’s a
nonprofit, it will be owned by the world,” Altman told me in
December 2015, just before the project was revealed to the
world.

Though it seemed clear that Altman was the primary instigator,
he was not yet OpenAI’s leader. But the company was squarely
under his bailiwick: OpenAI was to be part of the research wing
of the startup incubator Y Combinator, where Altman was CEO.
Altman had started the division to chase the dream of using
tech to solve the world’s knottiest problems when he became
YC’s top executive. The original plan for OpenAI was to gather a
relatively low number of the world’s best AI scientists and
discover the keys to artificial general intelligence able to
outperform humans on every dimension, inside a structure that
gave ownership of this unimaginably powerful technology to
the people, not giant corporations.