On Friday, November 17, 2023, around noon Pacific time, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Silicon Valley’s golden boy, avatar of the generative AI revolution, logged on to a Google Meet to see four of his five board members staring at him. From his video square, board member Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, was brief: Altman was being fired. The announcement would go out momentarily. Altman was in his room at a luxury hotel in Las Vegas to attend the city’s first Formula One race in a generation,
