The cofounder and CEO of artificial intelligence company OpenAI, Sam Altman, has described his sacking as a weird experience, with the tech world still reeling from his shock departure. Open AI - which makes ChatGPT - says it pushed Altman out after a review found he was "not consistently candid in his communications" with the board of directors. "The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI," the company said in a statement on Friday. In the year since Altman catapulted ChatGPT to global fame, he has become Silicon Valley's sought-after voice on the promise and potential dangers of artificial intelligence. His sudden and mostly unexplained exit has brought uncertainty to the industry's future. In a post on X early Saturday morning, Altman called what happened a "weird experience" and thanked his followers for the "outpouring of love." "it has been sorta like reading your own eulogy while you're still alive," Altman wrote. Mira Murati, OpenAI's chief technology officer, will take over as interim CEO effective immediately, the company said in its statement , while it searches for a permanent replacement. The announcement also said another OpenAI co-founder and top executive, Greg Brockman, the board's chairman, would step down from that role but remain at the company, where he serves as president. But later on X, formerly Twitter, Brockman posted a message he sent to OpenAI employees in which he wrote, "based on today's news, i quit." "Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today," Brockman wrote in another post. Altman helped start OpenAI as a nonprofit research laboratory in 2015. But it was ChatGPT's explosion into public consciousness that thrust Altman into the spotlight as a face of generative AI -- technology that can produce novel imagery, passages of text and other media. On a world tour this year, he was mobbed by a crowd of adoring fans at an event in London. He's had talks with multiple heads of state to discuss AI's potential and perils. On Thursday, he took part in a CEO summit at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, where OpenAI is based. He predicted AI will prove to be "the greatest leap forward of any of the big technological revolutions we've had so far." He also acknowledged the need for guardrails, calling attention to the existential dangers future AI could pose. OpenAI started out as a nonprofit when it launched with financial backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated aims were to "advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return." That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shifted nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT large language model for mimicking human writing. While OpenAI's board has preserved its nonprofit governance structure, the startup it oversees has increasingly sought to capitalise on its technology by tailoring its popular chatbot to business customers. Altman has a number of possible next steps. Even while running OpenAI, he placed large bets on several other ambitious projects. Among them are Helion Energy, for developing fusion reactors that could produce prodigious amounts of energy from the hydrogen in seawater, and Retro Biosciences, which aims to add 10 years to the human lifespan using biotechnology. Altman also co-founded Worldcoin, a biometric and cryptocurrency project that's been scanning people's eyeballs with the goal of creating a vast digital identity and financial network. Australian Associated Press