OpenAI also has extremely good options for replacements. Andrej Karpathy is back at OpenAI after leading Tesla’s autonomous driving, Ilya Sutskever is highly respected, etc. The perception I had of Sam Altman was that he was more so business side and not research side, (previous YC president, had a crypto startup on the side, raising VC funds, etc) so a move to a more research oriented C-Suite might also seem like a really good option to their board.