In an interview with Bilawal Sidhu on “The Ted AI Show,” which aired Tuesday, Toner said Altman lied to the board multiple times.
As an example, Toner said the OpenAI board learned of ChatGPT’s release on Twitter.
She said Altman “hid information” and “misrepresented what was happening at the company” for years.
Toner – one of the board members who voted to expel Altman – alleged that Altman also lied to the board by keeping it in the dark about the company’s ownership structure.
“Sam did not inform the board that he owned the OpenAI seed fund, even though he consistently claimed to be an independent board member with no financial interest in the company,” he said. -she declared.
Altman keeping that on the board “really hurt our ability to trust him” and the board was “already talking very seriously about needing to fire him” in October, she said.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Toner – currently director of strategy at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies – claims the OpenAI chief also gave board members “inaccurate information about the small number of formal security processes” that OpenAI had implemented.
She said that made it “fundamentally impossible” for the board to understand whether security measures were sufficient or whether changes were necessary.
She said there were other individual examples, but ultimately the board concluded that “we just couldn’t believe the things Sam was telling us, and this is a completely unachievable for a board of directors.
Toner added that it was “totally impossible” for the board to trust Altman’s word. The board, she said, had the role of providing independent oversight of OpenAI and “not just helping the CEO raise more money.”
But then, last October, the board had a number of conversations in which two executives detailed their own experiences with Altman in which they used the phrase “emotional abuse,” according to Toner.
She said executives told the board they “did not believe he was the right person to lead the company to AGI, telling us they did not believe he could or would change , that there was no point in giving him feedback, that there was no point in trying to do so.” solve these problems. »
By the time the board realized Altman needed to be replaced, Toner said it was clear that Altman “would do everything in his power” to keep the board from turn against him if he found out. She claims he “started lying to other board members to try to push me off the board.”
She said: “We were very careful, very deliberate about who we told, which was basically almost no one in advance, other than obviously our legal team and that’s kind of what got us to November 17.”
But Altman’s ouster didn’t last long.
As staff threatened to quit and speculation swirled that Microsoft might poach Altman’s team from OpenAI and hire him directly, the company’s board brought Altman back as CEO less than a year later. ‘a week later.
Toner resigned from his role as an OpenAI board member less than two weeks after Altman returned as CEO.
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