On a Friday in November 2023 the board of OpenAI fired Sam Altman by video call. By the following Tuesday he was back, the board was gone, and more than seven hundred of the company's seven hundred and seventy employees had signed a letter saying they would leave with him. This episode follows the whole road there: the Stanford dropout, the location app that failed respectably, running Y Combinator at twenty eight, founding OpenAI as a charity with Elon Musk, the decision to put a company underneath it, ChatGPT reaching a hundred million users in two months, and the five days that decided who controls the most talked about company in the world.
It also covers the five hundred billion dollar valuation, the Stargate announcement, the researchers who left, and the lawsuits. Founder Stories tells the story of one founder per episode, told plainly and in order.
