No one knows why Sam Altman was forced out of OpenAI. But gamblers on the decentralized prediction platform Polymarket are putting their money where their mouth is when they take a chance.
Over the weekend, Altman, the CEO of the multibillion-dollar artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT, was forced out of his role for “not being consistently candid in his communications” with the board.
While the memo wasn’t specific about why Altman was forced to leave the company, it wasn’t a reason for Polymarket bettors not to set up prediction market contracts to bet on why he left – or what he plans to do next doing.
Currently, the market with the most liquidity is one that asks the better players to predict whether Altman will be back as CEO by the end of the year. While ‘Yes’ shares are trading at 10 cents – which equates to a 10% chance – this outcome changed over Sunday US time when Bloomberg reported that former Twitch boss Emmet Shear had been appointed to the role.
Another contract asks whether Altman will be criminally charged by November 30, with Yes currently trading at 1 cent. A report from Axios, citing a leaked memo, says Altman’s firing “was not in response to any wrongdoing or anything related to our financial, business, safety or security/privacy practices.”
Contracts also ask better players whether, for example, Altman will announce a new company by November 24 (Yes is currently trading at 24 cents), whether Altman will sue OpenAI, or whether Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, will still be around. on January 1. More than $250,000 in liquidity was spread across eight prediction contracts on Sunday.
Some reports say Sutskever was instrumental in removing Altman from the company.
Meanwhile, AI-themed tokens rose this weekend as Musk announced that X was a shareholder in XAI, and OpenAI’s Macbethian corporate drama intrigued traders.