The Real Story Behind Sam Altman's Firing From OpenAI
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.
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The Hill
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