Sam Altman was the face of the not-so-mini AI revolution that took the world by surprise this year, so it was natural to be shocked when he was fired from OpenAI, the company behind the immensely popular chatbot ChatGPT. And it wasn’t just human beings who were taken back, even Altman’s iPhone needed a hot minute to process everything that was going on.
While we don’t know which iPhone Altman has, we’d wager he owns one of the recent models. Still, the news of Altman’s ouster was too much for the speedy Bionic chipset.
Speaking to Trevor Noah in his podcast, Altman said his iPhone stopped working after he was fired from OpenAI (via Business Insider). After he was asked to leave, Altman was bombarded with so many messages and notifications that it became impossible to use his phone for a while. iMessage also crumbled under the pressure and stopped working momentarily.
It wasn’t messages of condolences pouring in of course. After OpenAI president Greg Brockman and some other employees left the company to protest the decision, people who were interested in working with Altman started messaging him. People miss no time shooting their shots.
My phone was just like unusable because it was just notifications nonstop. iMessage did this thing where it stopped working for a while, then messages got delivered late, then it marked everything as read.”
Altman was upset and confused after OpenAI’s board decided to fire him
Sam Altman was reinstated as the CEO of OpenAI within a week of his firing after immense pressure from employees and investors.
Altman said that OpenAI’s decision to fire him confused him and he found it hard to accept the news. The board never gave a clear reason for its decision and only said that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.”
