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On Friday, the board of OpenAI, the buzzy AI company behind viral chatbot ChatGPT, suddenly and publicly ousted its CEO Sam Altman. The announcement came one day after he appeared publicly on behalf of his company at Thursday’s APEC CEO Summit.

OpenAI’s board said it conducted “a deliberative review process” and that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.”

“The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI,” the board’s statement continued.

As of this week, OpenAI’s six-person board included OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman, who was also chairman of the board; Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist; Adam D’Angelo; Tasha McCauley; Helen Toner; and Altman himself. The company began publicly posting its board’s member list on its website in July, after the departures of LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, director of Neuralink Shivon Zilis and former Texas congressman Will Hurd.

Here’s a rundown of the board behind the controversial shake-up:

Greg Brockman: An OpenAI co-founder, Brockman quit his role at the company on Friday in protest of Altman’s ousting, saying publicly, “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today.” Brockman spent five years as CTO of Stripe before moving on to help launch OpenAI. In 2020, Brockman said OpenAI’s top obstacle in its first five years was the idea that making the full extent of the startup’s work public wasn’t necessarily beneficial for humanity, in his eyes. At the time, he said, “We realized that as these things get powerful, they’re dual-use…and that we as technology developers have a responsibility to not just say, ‘Hey, we built this thing, it’s up to the world to decide how to use it.'”

Ilya Sutskever: As of now, Sutskever is the sole remaining OpenAI co-founder on the board. After co-founding DNNResearch — an AI startup focused on neural networks — and selling it to Google, Sutskever joined Google as a research scientist and stayed for nearly three years before moving on to OpenAI as a co-founder and research director. Since November 2018, he’s been the company’s chief scientist.

Adam D’Angelo: The current CEO of Quora, a social platform for questions and answers, D’Angelo spent nearly four years at Facebook and was CTO of the tech giant from 2006 to 2008. He is not an employee at OpenAI.

Tasha McCauley: McCauley, who is not an OpenAI employee, is on the board of directors of both OpenAI and GeoSim Systems, a geospatial tech company. She is an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation and has been on the OpenAI board since 2018.

Helen Toner: Toner is a board member and non-OpenAI employee who spent time at the University of Oxford’s Center for the Governance of AI, and has been a director of strategy for Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology for nearly five years. Last year, Toner told the Journal of Political Risk that, “Building AI systems that are safe, reliable, fair, and interpretable is an enormous open problem… Organizations building and deploying AI will also have to recognize that beating their competitors to market— or to the battlefield — is to no avail if the systems they’re fielding are buggy, hackable, or unpredictable.”

Earlier this year, Microsoft’s expanded investment in OpenAI — an additional $10 billion — made it the biggest AI investment of the year, according to PitchBook. In April, the startup reportedly closed a $300 million share sale at a valuation between $27 billion and $29 billion, with investments from firms such as Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz. Despite its significant investment, however, Microsoft has no board seat at OpenAI.

“While our partnership with Microsoft includes a multibillion-dollar investment, OpenAI remains an entirely independent company governed by the OpenAI Nonprofit,” OpenAI has publicly stated. “Microsoft has no board seat and no control. And… AGI is explicitly carved out of all commercial and IP licensing agreements. These arrangements exemplify why we chose Microsoft as our compute and commercial partner.”

Microsoft had no new comments to add on Saturday and requests for comments from board members weren’t immediately returned to CNBC.

OpenAI’s product feature announcements earlier this month showed that one of the hottest companies in tech has been rapidly evolving its offerings in an effort to stay ahead of rivals like Anthropic, Google and Meta in the AI arms race.

ChatGPT, which broke records as the fastest-growing consumer app in history months after its launch, now has about 100 million weekly active users, OpenAI said this month. More than 92% of Fortune 500 companies use the platform, up from 80% in August, and they span across industries like financial services, legal applications and education, according to Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO-turned-interim CEO.

The news of Altman’s ousting comes after OpenAI’s Dev Day, the company’s first in-person event, on Nov. 6, which also included a surprise appearance by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

“The systems that are needed as you aggressively push forward on your road map require us to be on the top of our game, and we intend fully to commit ourselves fully to making sure you all… have not only the best systems for training and inference, but also the most compute,” Nadella told Altman while onstage together at Dev Day. He added, “That’s the way we’re going to make progress.”

On that day, Altman told Nadella, “I think we have the best partnership in tech and I’m excited for us to build AGI together.”

As recently as last month, OpenAI was reportedly in talks to close a deal that would lead to an $80 billion valuation. When CNBC asked OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap about that deal, he declined to comment.

At OpenAI’s Dev Day, in response to a CNBC question about GPT-5, Altman said, “We want to do it, but we don’t have a timeline.”

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Arm shares dip 8% on revenue miss

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Arm shares dip 8% on revenue miss

The replica of the ARM is an electronic chip board during a collaborative ceremony launching a partnership between Malaysia and ARM Holdings in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on March 5, 2025.

Hari Anggara | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Arm Holdings shares dipped as much as 9% in after-hours trading on the company’s first-quarter earnings results Wednesday.

 Here’s how the company did, compared with estimates from analysts polled by LSEG:

  • Earnings per share: 35 cents vs. 35 cents expected.
  • Revenue: $1.05 billion vs. $1.06 billion expected.

The company said it expects second-quarter revenue in the range of $1.01 billion to $1.11 billion, which was in line with $1.05 billion expected by analysts tracked by LSEG.

ARM is a chip technology firm that sells architecture for making chips that power billions of devices, including Apple and Qualcomm‘s chips.

During the quarter, Samsung launched the Galaxy Flip 7 based on the Exynos 2500, built on Arm’s compute subsystem platform.

CEO Rene Haas said in an interview with Reuters that the company was “consciously deciding to invest more heavily,” suggesting the company is considering designing its own processors.

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Qualcomm beats on earnings, highlights growth in Meta smartglasses

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Qualcomm beats on earnings, highlights growth in Meta smartglasses

Cristiano Amon, CEO & President, Qualcomm, on Centre Stage during day one of Web Summit 2024 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal.

Shauna Clinton | Sportsfile | Getty Images

Qualcomm reported fiscal third-quarter earnings on Wednesday that beat Wall Street expectations and provided a stronger-than-expected guide for the current quarter. Qualcomm shares slid in extended trading.

Here’s how the chipmaker did for the quarter ending June 29 compared to LSEG consensus expectations:

  • Earnings per share: $2.77 adjusted versus $2.71 expected
  • Revenue: $10.37 billion versus $10.35 billion expected

In the current quarter, Qualcomm said it expected $2.85 per share at the midpoint of adjusted earnings on $10.7 billion in revenue at the midpoint. Analysts polled by LSEG were expecting $2.83 in adjusted earnings per share on $10.35 billion in revenue.

Net income during the quarter ending in June was $2.66 billion, or $2.43 per share, versus $2.13 billion, or $1.88 per share a year ago.

Qualcomm’s most important business is selling chips for smartphones under its Snapdragon brand, including the central processor and modem for high-end devices made by Samsung. It also provides modems to Apple. Its handset chip business reported $6.33 billion in revenue during the quarter, just shy of Wall Street expectations of $6.44 billion.

Qualcomm expects to lose Apple as a customer for its modem business in the coming years. But the company has been working to diversify its business by making chips for other devices, including Windows PCs and Meta‘s Quest virtual-reality headsets and Meta Ray-Bans smart glasses.

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Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon highlighted the company’s work with Meta in a short interview on Wednesday.

He said that making chips for devices like Meta’s Ray-Bans smart glasses was a good example of the chipmaker’s AI strategy, which was to embrace “personal AI,” or AI applications that run on devices, not the cloud.

Qualcomm reports its Meta revenues under its “Internet of Things” division, which had $1.68 billion in revenue during the quarter.

Amon referenced Mark Zuckerberg‘s AI vision statement Wednesday that focused on “personal superintelligence,” saying “the upside we had in the quarter within IoT is what we do in with smart glasses.”

CFO Akash Palkhiwala said that Meta had stronger-than-expected chip consumption during the quarter.

On Monday, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica said that sales of the smart glasses more than tripled on an annual basis.

“Mark put out a video today, just with a very clear vision of how they see personal AI and super intelligence evolving, and we are a key part of making that division happen,” Palkhiwala said.

Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are powered by a Qualcomm chip. Qualcomm, Samsung and Google are working on smart glasses, according to Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon.

Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images

Amon also said Qualcomm would start to provide data about how much its chip business is growing without Apple — about 15% this year, he said.

Qualcomm is also looking to expand into data centers and sell versions of its chips that can be used for deploying artificial intelligence, Amon said on a call with an analysts. He said that Qualcomm was already in discussions with a major cloud company — called a hyperscaler — to supply AI chips. He said that Qualcomm could start to see revenues in its fiscal 2028.

“While we are in the early stages of this expansion, we are engaged with multiple potential customers,” Among said. “We are currently in advanced discussions with a leading hyperscaler.”

The company’s automotive business has been highlighted by Amon as one of the biggest growth opportunities for the company, but in the third quarter, it grew 21% to $984 million, below the 24% growth rate of the company’s IoT business.

Qualcomm’s other major division is QTL, which includes licensing fees for technology that Qualcomm developed and patented, including parts of the 5G standard. Overall, QTL revenues rose 11% to $1.32 billion.

Qualcomm said it spent just under $1 billion on cash dividends and $2.8 billion repurchasing 19 million shares of its stock during the quarter.

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Meta’s Reality Labs posts $4.53 billion loss in second quarter

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Meta’s Reality Labs posts .53 billion loss in second quarter

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg presents Orion AR Glasses as he makes a keynote speech during the Meta Connect annual event at the company’s headquarters in Menlo Park, California, on Sept. 25, 2024.

Manuel Orbegozo | Reuters

Meta’s Reality Labs, the unit tasked with building the futuristic metaverse, continues bleeding money.

The social media company reported its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday and revealed that Reality Labs logged an operating loss of $4.53 billion while recording $370 million in sales during the period. Analysts were projecting that unit to post a second-quarter operating loss of $4.99 billion while generating $381 million in sales.

The Reality Labs division oversees the Quest line of virtual reality headsets in addition to the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses, which are jointly developed with the French-Italian eyewear giant EssilorLuxottica. Meta wants Reality Labs to create cutting-edge products similar to the prototype Orion augmented reality glasses that could underpin a new, immersive computing platform.

But developing VR, AR and other new devices is an expensive endeavor, with the Reality Labs division logging nearly $70 billion in cumulative losses since late 2020. Meta in April said Reality Labs recorded an operating loss of $4.2 billion during the first quarter while bringing in $412 million in sales.

Although the Quest VR headsets haven’t become breakout hits, the Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses are showing signs of success.

EssilorLuxottica on Monday said Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses sales more than tripled year over year for the first half of 2025. The eyewear giant and Meta debuted in June the new Oakley Meta smart glasses, which is the latest product spawned from their partnership.

Meta said in April that an undisclosed number of Reality Labs employees who were part of its Oculus Studios VR and AR software unit were laid off.

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