‘iMessage broke on my phone’: Sam Altman’s first 30 mins after his OpenAI exit
“My phone was just unusable because it was just like notifications non-stop and iMessage hit this thing where it stopped working for a while,” said Sam Altam.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, during a conversation with comedian Trevor Noah in a video podcast, talked about his personal experience after he was fired on a Google Meet call. Altman shared that he was left ‘confused,’ ‘upset,’ and ‘pained’ by the board’s decision. He also mentioned that he received so many text messages after his dismissal that the iMessage app on his phone stopped working.
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Altman was in Las Vegas for the Formula One Grand Prix when the company sacked him. “I never got to watch any race that whole weekend. I was in my hotel room, took this call I had no idea was going to be and got fired by the board,” Altman said.
He added, “It was obviously upsetting and painful, but confusion was just like the dominant emotion at that point. It was like it was just enough fog and a haze. I was like, I didn’t understand what’s happening. It happened in this like unprecedentedly, in my opinion, crazy way.”
OpenAI CEO also shared that his iMessage stopped working due to getting so many texts within half an hour of his ouster. “And then in the next like half hour, I got so many messages that iMessage like broke on my phone. My phone was just unusable because it was just like notifications non-stop and iMessage like hit this thing where it stopped working for a while. That message got delivered late, then it marked everything as read, so I couldn’t even like tell like,” he further expressed.
After being fired from OpenAI on November 17, Altman returned to his position as CEO of the company on November 30.