Should we be worried about OpenAI?
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Contact your participating dealer or visit FordService.com for important details and limitations. Welcome to Search Engine, no question too big, no question too small. This week, should we be worried about OpenAI? So last fall, we reported a story about OpenAI, the leading company in artificial intelligence, led by charismatic co-founder Sam Altman. The company was famous not just for its runaway success, but also for their unusual ethos and structure. Rather than simply being a for-profit company, it was a non-profit in charge of a for-profit company. And that nonprofit could seemingly disable the for-profit company at any point if it decided that the company was acting in a way that was dangerous for society.
It was like a tech company with a doomsday switch built into it. A recognition both of AI's potential power to reshape society, as well as an understanding perhaps that the last round of technological innovation has not been completely wonderful for the world. Our last story was about how OpenAI's nonprofit guardians had decided that the company had in fact gone off course. In November, 2023, they deposed their own leader, suddenly and dramatically. Sam Altman is out as CEO of OpenAI, the company just announcing a leadership transition.
The godfather of chat GPT kicked out of the company he founded.
It looks like things were over for Sam Altman until his loyalists got on board with a counter coup. Nearly every rank and file employee at the company signed a petition demanding his return.
90 percent of the company's 770 employees signed a letter threatening to leave unless the current board of directors resigned and reinstated Altman as head of OpenAI.
Finally, Microsoft, OpenAI's biggest shareholder, also stepped in, in support of Sam. Quickly thereafter, he was reinstated.
Sam Altman back as CEO of OpenAI. OpenAI posting on X that Sam Altman will now officially return as CEO. It's also overhauling the board that fired him with new directors, ending a dramatic five-day standoff that's transfixed Silicon Valley and the artificial intelligence industry.
So OpenAI's rebellious board was basically replaced with a compliant one. Sam Altman, who was temporarily deemed too dangerous to run his own company, instead consolidated power there. That was a year ago. In the years since, OpenAI has not turned on an army of terminators to kill us all, but the company has transformed into a somewhat different-seeming institution, with lots of strange public errors and judgment along the way. We hoped to talk to someone at OpenAI for this story. They did not make anyone available for comment. So instead, I called a tech journalist I know.
Want to see something crazy?
Of course I want to see something crazy.
Okay. Oh, I guess I can only go one way.
Wait, what are you doing?
I just got a new webcam and it follows my face.
But it didn't follow your face.
Now it's not following it. Damn it!
You just stood up and just sashayed out a frame and I was like trying to figure out what I was supposed to pay attention to. Casey Newton, founder and editor of the Platformer newsletter, co-host of the Hard Fork podcast, and perhaps a sometimes too early adopter of exciting technologies. Casey's a reporter we spoke to last year when everything seemed to be exploding at OpenAI.
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