From King to Exile to King Again: The Inside Story of Sam Altman’s Whiplash Week

For more than a year, OpenAI had been on a glide path to AI dominance—then came 120 hours of self-inflicted chaos that shook an industry.

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Late Thursday afternoon, on what would become the eve of his firing from OpenAI, Sam Altman joined rivals from Google and Meta Platforms on stage at the APEC CEO Summit in San Francisco to discuss the future of artificial intelligence. In an uncanny foreshadowing of the drama to come, the event’s moderator was Laurene Powell Jobs, whose late husband, Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, was once defenestrated by his own board, only to return to lead it to greater heights.

Altman brushed off questions from Powell Jobs about whether the rapid development of AI tools could lead to “human catastrophe.” The OpenAI CEO opined that some of the safety concerns critics had raised were misguided. Eventually, he explained, the industry would need more stringent regulatory safeguards, but now wasn’t the time for that. “The current models are fine,” he said. “We don’t need heavy regulation here, probably not even for the next couple of generations.”