OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, 39, Talks Being Fired, Rehired

It’s clear that Sam Altman, the 39-year-old co-founder of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, is looking ahead after he was fired (and quickly rehired) almost a year ago from the company he co-founded after the board accused him of not being “consistently candid.”

In a Tuesday podcast episode of Life in Seven Songs from the San Francisco Standard, Altman shared that the shock-firing “was this crazy traumatic thing to go through, and it was quite public.”

Related: Former OpenAI Board Member Reveals Why She Had CEO Sam Altman Fired

This follows an optimistic blog post that Altman published Monday, “The Intelligence Age,” outlining how he hopes AI will transform society in the next few decades, with “astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics” becoming “commonplace.”

Though he’s now one of the public faces behind the effort to have AI change the future, his road to leadership wasn’t always smooth — or certain.

Days after Altman was fired 10 months ago, 95% of OpenAI signed a letter threatening to quit unless Altman was reinstated. Meanwhile, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella offered Altman a job leading an advanced AI research group at Microsoft.

Altman ended up back in the OpenAI CEO position less than a week after the initial firing.

“And I didn’t get time—because it was a lot of pieces to pick up—I didn’t get time to deal with it or recover,” Altman said on the podcast. “And the first few months were just this crazy fugue. It took a lot out of me.”

Related: ChatGPT’s Sam Altman Says This Is the One Thing Keeps Him Up at Night

While back at the office, Altman said he still finds small reminders of that drama-filled day, whether it’s old paperwork or lawyer memos, though, he took away a few positive lessons from the experience that are less visible.

“I learned a lot about gratitude,” Altman said. “There’s just overwhelming gratitude for the people around me and what I get to do. I really value a sense of duty and that you don’t turn your back on things no matter how hard they are if it’s what you signed up for, and what you feel committed to, and what you think is important. And that was a real growing up moment for me and something that I’m proud of and happy about.”

^{Sam Altman. Photo Credit: Life in Seven Songs}

Altman also shared on the podcast that he keeps a handaxe, a prehistoric stone tool, in his office as a reminder of how far humanity has come.

“I stare at that thing a lot,” he said.

Related: Can ChatGPT Help Start a Business? I Tried the Latest Version, GPT-4o, to Find Out.

In the “Intelligence Age” post, Altman wrote that technology brought humanity from the Stone Age to the Agricultural Age to the Industrial Age. He stated that we could have superintelligence, or AI smarter than the brightest human minds, in “a few thousand days” and called the development “the most consequential fact about all of history so far.”

Though OpenAI is now worth $86 billion, the company is talking to investors to possibly raise $6.5 billion at a valuation of $150 billion, per Bloomberg.