12/20/2023 0 Comments Valley news dis jobsOn one side, there are so-called accelerationists, who see the productivity gains from this near-magical tech breakthrough as the next leap forward for capitalism. AI’s benefits to humanity quickly became the big debate point. OpenAI’s big-bang moment was its announcement of a $10 billion investment from Microsoft in January, a huge payday that elevated Altman as the face of AI and instantly upstaged incumbent AI powers like Google and its DeepMind subsidiary subsidiary. Fast forward eight years to early 2023, and ChatGPT was exploding into the mainstream consciousness, becoming the most quickly adopted technology in history after its late 2022 launch and sending a shock through a Wall Street weathering the first bear market in decades. (Three other board members-Texas congressman Will Hurd, Neuralink director Shivon Zilis, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman-stepped down earlier this year.) From do-gooder startup to tech juggernautĪs The New York Times put it at OpenAI’s formation in 2015, OpenAI was explicitly set up as a nonprofit artificial-intelligence research center, with the specific goal of developing a “digital intelligence” to benefit humanity. OpenAI’s board of directors includes Sutskever Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo Tasha McCauley, a tech entrepreneur and adjunct senior management scientist at the RAND Corporation, and Helen Toner, director of strategy at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology. (Another co-founder, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, stepped back in 2018, citing a conflict of interest between OpenAI and Tesla’s autonomous ambitions, though some reports say it was due to a power struggle.) With the departure of Altman and Brockman, Sutskever is the only one of the company’s founders who remains at OpenAI. Since then, three senior scientists have resigned from the company, Ars Technica reports. Brockman, who was not part of the meeting, was stripped of his chairman title as part of the leadership overhaul, but the board planned to keep him on staff, according to OpenAI’s statement. According to Brockman, OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever asked Altman to join a video meeting with the board at noon on Friday, where they informed Altman he was being fired. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by what the board did today,” Brockman posted on X. Speculation is rife over the reason for Altman’s surprise firing on Friday and the subsequent resignation of President Greg Brockman a few hours later. The exact cause of the messy Altman/OpenAI divorce is still unclear, but one leading early theory points to tensions related to OpenAI’s nonprofit origins and its current status as one of the powerful tech companies in the world - a strain that overlaps with a broader AI industry schism between “accelerationists” and the “doomers.” The fateful Friday afternoon Four years later, Jobs was worth $200 million the following year, he made the cover of Time. Jobs founded Apple in 1976 with Steve Wozniak when Jobs was just 21. There are undeniable parallels with the Steve Jobs story. Unusually for a tech founder, Altman had no equity stake in OpenAI and so didn’t exercise the type of control other founders like Mark Zuckerberg are known to do unlike other tech leaders, Altman’s fame came not from his engineering brilliance but from his ability to raise large amounts of money and his bets on ambitious, world-changing technology. Altman, who co-founded OpenAI in 2015 after running the prestigious tech incubator Y Combinator, has presided over the startup as its ChatGPT bot surged to popularity. Bloomberg writer Ashlee Vance made the same comparison, posting: “This is like Apple firing Steve Jobs only they’re doing it after the iPhone has become the best selling computer in history.”Ī day after Altman’s sudden dismissal, it remains a mystery why the most important company in the AI-driven “fourth industrial revolution” abruptly dismissed its superstar CEO.
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