The real story behind Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On a balmy mid-November evening in 2023, billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel threw a birthday party for his husband at YESS, an avant-garde Japanese restaurant located in a century-old converted bank building in Los Angeles’s Arts District. Seated next to him was his friend Sam Altman.

Thiel had backed Altman’s first venture fund more than a decade before, and remained a mentor to the younger investor when Altman became the face of the artificial-intelligence revolution as the chief executive of OpenAI. OpenAI’s instantly viral launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 had propelled tech stocks to one of their best years in decades. Yet Thiel was worried.

Years before he met Altman, Thiel had taken another AI-obsessed prodigy named Eliezer Yudkowsky under his wing, funding his institute, which pushed to make sure that any AI smarter than humans would be friendly to its maker. That March, Yudkowsky had argued in Time magazine that unless the current wave of AI research was halted, “literally everyone on Earth will die." “You don’t understand how Eliezer has programmed half the people in your company to believe in that stuff," Thiel warned Altman. “You need to take this more seriously." Altman picked at his vegetarian dish and tried not to roll his eyes.

This was not the first dinner where Thiel had warned him that the company had been taken over by “the EAs," by which he meant people who subscribed to effective altruism. EA had lately pivoted from trying to end global poverty to trying to prevent runaway AI from murdering humanity. Thiel had repeatedly predicted that “the AI safety people" would “destroy" OpenAI.