Why Did OpenAI Fire Sam Altman? Helen Toner And The E/Acc vs. Effective Altruism Divide Explained

OpenAI's board of directors found themselves in hot water recently after making the seemingly rash decision to fire the company's CEO, Sam Altman.

Altman notably co-founded OpenAI in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab but was removed from his position by a board consisting of his peers for "not [being] consistently candid in his communications."

Altman was reinstated to his position after nearly all 790 of his employees pledged to resign in protest, with many onlookers still unclear on the specifics of his firing.

Amidst all the finger-pointing lies an ideological divide between those in the company who believe AI poses an existential risk and those who aim to push the technology to its limits.

In case you're still lost as to what happened with this whole debacle or why it made headlines over the last week, here's a quick explainer on what you need to know about the OpenAI drama.

When And Why Was Sam Altman Fired From OpenAI?

On November 17th, artificial intelligence research organization OpenAI (who created products like GPT and DALL-E) released a statement from their board of directors saying that CEO Sam Altman had been fired due to his history of "not [being] consistently candid in his communications with the board."

But the board of directors' resolution about firing Altman was shortlived, as public outcry against the move, combined with Microsoft's Satya Nadella immediately swooping in to hire Altman, led to Chief Scientist and the board member who told Sam he was fired, Ilya Sutskever, backpedaling on the role he played in the controversy.

How Did Investors And Employees React To Altman's Firing?

Altman has been the public face of OpenAI for years and has played a key role in fundraising and outreach. Altman's firing for seemingly unspecified reasons led to the company's stock price dipping alongside public confidence.

OpenAI was set to sell over $86 billion in shares soon after Altman was reportedly fired, leaving investors in the company livid at losing value.

It also wasn't just investors. Over 700 OpenAI employees, many of whom own OpenAI stock, threatened to resign over Altman's ousting, going so far as to start an X campaign in which they posted "OpenAI is nothing without its people." Perplexingly enough, Sutskever's name was high on the list.

Who, Or What, Do People Think Was Behind Sam's Firing?

While initial speculations centered around Quora founder Adam D'Angelo, new evidence suggests that Helen Toner, a Director of Research at Georgetown University, was the one responsible for ousting Altman.

It's important to note that OpenAI considers itself to be a nonprofit research lab, with the board of directors being appointed without pay or any sort of compensation.

According to a New York Times article published on the day of Altman's reinstatement, Helen Toner and Altman had butted heads in the weeks leading up to November 17th. Altman objected to a paper Toner had published that seemed to criticize OpenAI’s efforts to keep its AI technologies safe while praising the approach taken by Anthropic, a company that has become OpenAI’s biggest rival and was started by OpenAI defectors.

Altman thought that it was a blow to the company to have a board member criticize their product. According to the New York Times, Toner thought that "the board’s mission was to ensure that the company creates artificial intelligence that 'benefits all of humanity,' and if the company was destroyed, she said, that could be consistent with its mission."

Why Are People Making Memes Pitting "Effective Accelerationism" Against "Effective Altruism"?

Many tech and artificial intelligence enthusiasts have divided themselves into two camps with opposing ideas on what speed at which artificial intelligence must be developed. Effective Altruists are essentially technological utilitarians who are concerned with generating the best possible outcome for humanity using evidence and reasoning.

Effective Accelerationists, on the other hand, are part of a fringe decentralized ideological movement that believes in accelerated, unfettered AI development with the hopes that it leads to a technological utopia.

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Many of the people closely following the happenings at OpenAI noted Helen Toner's connection with the EA movement, and likened Sam Altman's role in expanding AI with the E/Acc movement. The two camps began sharing memes and jokes about the two being at loggerheads due to ideological differences, with EA proponents being called "safetyists" and "decels."

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For the full history of Sam Altman Being Fired From OpenAI, check out Know Your Meme's encyclopedia entry for more information.