Despite the seemingly wild success of ChatGPT amid Silicon Valley’s massive push into artificial intelligence technologies, OpenAI made a shocking move by abruptly firing its CEO Sam Altman. The ouster went down on Friday night and stunned the tech world as Altman was seen as a competent CEO, who had just announced an aggressive slew of suites during OpenAI’s Developer Day earlier in the month. However, it’s that aggressiveness that reportedly led to his removal.
Initially, the OpenAI board released a statement that claimed Altman’s firing was because he was not “consistently candid in his communications.” But as the story unfolded, the board seemed to regret its decision as more details emerged. At the center of the issue was the Developer Day event, which kicked off concerns that Altman was moving too quickly and dangerously with the AI technology.
Via CNN:
That’s fine, perhaps, when it’s a dating app or a social media platform. It’s something entirely different when it’s a technology so good at mimicking human speech and behavior that it can fool people into believing its fake conversations and images are real.
And that’s what reportedly scared the company’s board, which remained majority controlled by the nonprofit wing of the company. [Kara] Swisher reported that OpenAI’s recent developer conference served as an inflection point: Altman announced that OpenAI would make tools available so anyone could create their own version of ChatGPT.
For [Ilya] Sutskever and the board, that was a step too far.
To be clear, the board had justifiable concerns about AI that have been rampant in the scientific community. Unfortunately, for OpenAI, those concerns bumped up against the need for the company to keep revenue coming in for the highly expensive technology, and that’s where Altman ran into trouble. ChatGPT has already had to throttle customer use because the cost of computing power for each query was astronomical.
Via TIME:
From Altman’s point of view, raising more money and finding additional revenue sources were essential. But some members of the board, with ties to the AI-skeptical effective altruism movement, viewed this in tension with the risks posed by advanced AI. Many effective altruists — a pseudo-philosophical movement that seeks to donate money to head off existential risks — have imagined scenarios in which a powerful AI system could be used by a terrorist group to, say, create a bioweapon. Or in the absolute worst case scenario the AI could spontaneously turn bad, take control of weapons systems and attempt to wipe out human civilization. Not everyone takes this scenario seriously, and other AI leaders, including Altman, have argued that such concerns can be managed and that the potential benefits from making AI broadly available outweighs the risks.
Despite the freakout over concerns that Altman is moving too quickly with the controversial technology, he has already been hired by Microsoft to oversee a new AI venture. Meanwhile, OpenAI employees feel the firing of Altman was an egregious mistake, and according to Gizmodo, the majority are threatening to quit if the board members who ousted Altman don’t resign.