OpenAI Leadership Shakeup and What it Means for the Future of AI Transcript

It’s a major corporate shakeup in the world of artificial intelligence. Microsoft announced today that it has hired Sam Altman, the co-founder of Chat GPT maker, OpenAI, after he was unexpectedly fired from that company days earlier.

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Microsoft is a financial partner in OpenAI.. Altman had kicked off a global race for artificial intelligence supremacy and was the face of the AI boom, often drawing comparisons to tech giants like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs.

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Mike Isaac is covering all of this for the New York Times and joins us now. Mike, as best I can piece together from your great reporting and a couple of conversations I had with tech industry watchers, the OpenAI board, which is influenced by the interests of scientists, was worried that the company’s expansion was out of control, might even call it dangerous. Sam Altman was arguing that he was trying to grow the business out of a necessity. Do I have that right? Fill in the blanks. What ultimately led to his ouster?

Yeah, you’re totally right. Part of the fascinating dynamics of this company is that it’s a very small board with very ideologically driven directors on that board. One of the big concerns from them is that AI is going to spin out of control and ultimately be a destroying force for humanity. It sounds like Terminator, but it is actually something that these people think about and talk about a lot of the time.

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Sam Altman’s point of view has essentially been we need to speed up our tech development of our artificial intelligence as a way to better humanity, to offer people different services in developing countries that they may not have had if we didn’t have the robots to give it to them.

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So it’s been a battle of safety versus accelerationism of the tech, and at least on Friday, the Sam side that is pushing for more aggressive development lost and now we’re seeing a real drawn out battle as to whether he can make it back to the company basically.

A breakup between a founder and his or her board is nothing new in Silicon Valley. It’s a tale as old as time. Help our audience understand what made Sam Altman’s ouster so stunning.

Sam Altman basically became this poster child for the development of AI. AI has been in the works for decades, it’s not exactly a new computer science, but with the release of Chat GPT, this really consumer facing what’s called generative AI product where computers can predict what to respond and give you different answers in ways that historically, computer systems aren’t really able to do.

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It created a real rush in the industry to build these technologies from Apple to Meta to Microsoft to Google, and Sam became the leader of the whole movement. OpenAI, to his credit, he wasn’t just all flash, they actually have very strong deep technology and ultimately all the employees at the company believed in him, which is why it was such a shock and really damaging for the company when the board fired him.

That’s right. This is the latest twist in all of this. You have more than 700 employees at OpenAI, a company that employs 770 people, they’re now threatening to quit and join Microsoft and Sam Altman now with a major title, lots of influence at this company, he’s in the position to hire them?

That’s exactly right. OpenAI is big for a startup, but still a pretty small company. If 90% effectively of your staff goes, this company could go from approximately $80 billion valuation to $0 in just a few days, which means investors will be losing out on all their investment, employees, I’m talking to employees who are on the way there, don’t know if they’re going to have a job, and Microsoft could end up ultimately having a coup here and gaining all of their employees and technology for not actually having to buy the company outright, which is really unprecedented in a lot of ways in the tech landscape.

In the meantime, what is the impact on the development of generative AI?

It’s a great question. I do think that one thing that Microsoft and Sam have in their back pocket is they’re taking the best, most talented engineers and computer scientists at the top of the company with them and essentially the intellectual property and what’s called IP behind it.

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They could pick up where they left off at Microsoft, which it would still take some time to spin things up, and the destruction of OpenAI means building a whole lot of new things at Microsoft, but I think this is only a speed bump for them.

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I also think it’s going to spur all sorts of bursts of competition at other companies like Meta, Google, other folks who felt behind OpenAI, but now are feeling a second wind based, at least on some of the conversations that I’ve had with them.

We will be watching Micah Isaac of the New York Times. Thanks so much.

Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me.