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Even the best-run companies have occasional leadership crises. But if you asked ChatGPT to come up with a blockbuster boardroom-bloodbath movie scenario, I doubt it would propose anything as extreme as this week’s events in its own San Francisco-based parent company, OpenAI.

Chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman was fired last week for failing to be ‘consistently candid’ with OpenAI’s board, though no one was prepared to say what he had not been candid about. By Monday he had a new job leading AI research at Microsoft, OpenAI’s 49 per cent shareholder. One inside source claimed 743 of OpenAI’s 770 staff had signed a letter supporting him and many of them would follow him to Microsoft. But late on Tuesday, Altman and his ally Greg Brockman, who had resigned in sympathy, were reinstated at OpenAI – which also announced a new board of directors.

Underlying this drama are fears that Altman was driving too fast towards ‘advanced general intelligence’ applications beyond human control.