Open AI fires itself CEO Sam Altman
Let’s start at the beginning. OpenAI was founded in 2015 by investors, including Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel, AWS, and YC Research. The goal was to pursue Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) safely for the benefit of humanity. Their mission statement is simple:
Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.
There was an initial pledge of $1 billion, but the money that came in was $100 million from Elon Musk and $30 million from Open Philanthropy. The goal was to pursue an open-source approach to AI so everyone could see how AGI was being developed in public. The company needed a lot more capital, given that AI is capital-intensive.
The company’s DNA likely split in 2019 during the transition to for-profit. The company had been working for four years on AI research and was now pursuing a business model.
The recent dynamism of OpenAI has mostly been attributed to a classic Silicon Valley-style startup attached to an AI Safety think tank. In hindsight, it seems obvious that the two organizations would come to blows. Sam Altman was the one who brought this reckless greed and prevarication to an otherwise research-oriented start-up
Someone has left the board almost every year since 2016, but I think the central focus should be on 2023 because one-third of the board left within two quarters. This created a power vacuum that didn’t get filled. This would be the moment a power struggle had to be made, leading to Sam Altman being fired.
Sam has been on the board from the beginning. But Sam has also been involved in many different projects over time. It is quite a mystery why he left Y Combinator, but his firing from OpenAI likely had many reasons. The board’s stated reason was for lack of communication, and an internal memo confirmed no malfeasance. Our best guess about the lack of communication was a new venture to disrupt Nvidia’s hold on chips or miscommunication around OpenAI DevDay. It’s likely against the AI Safety board members’ interest to continue the push for GPT for all.
Ilya Sutskever is the key vote that created the coup that ousted Sam and Greg last Friday. Ilya, like Greg, has been there since the beginning. He’s always been on the technology side and was the co-inventor of AlexNet and an author of the AlphaGo paper. He invented the sequence-to-sequence technology at Google Brain. He left Google Brain in 2015 to become the cofounder and chief scientist of OpenAI in 2015.
OpenAI was pitched as an anti-Google, given the extreme concentration of AI research talent there. And its key focus was on safety.
In many ways, Ilya was one of the original pieces of OpenAI. But as the for-profit arm of OpenAI came to rule the organization’s mission, he likely started to feel uncomfortable with the “Move Fast and Break Things” ethos of the startup.
Will it be a David vs Goliath or just petty politics, the world waits to see.