OpenAI Chat the Bed
For the past few years, you’ve been warned that AI could destroy humanity. Over the weekend, you were reminded that humans are perfectly capable of screwing things up themselves. In computer keyboard lingo, just hours after the OpenAI board hit Ctrl Altman Delete, investors sent in an elite Command Z team, but they failed to Command-S the leadership, causing Sam Altman to hit the ESC key, uploading himself to Redmond where Microsoft seems on the way to hitting Command-A, Command-C, and Command-V, basically copying and pasting all of OpenAI into their company, as more than 500 OpenAI employees have threatened to hit Command-Q and follow Altman to Microsoft. Does all of this chaos at big tech’s hottest company seem confusing? Don’t worry, even ChatGPT is responding with the shrug emoji. Meanwhile, it’s been 72 hours since OpenAI’s implosion, and there’s still no Netflix series. The era of peak TV is over.
+ Plenty of tech reporters were thinking about hitting Control-Q on their careers as the glide into a nice, slow Thanksgiving week was interrupted by one of the industry’s wildest and most unexpected stories. It took three top NYT (Gift Article) reporters three paragraphs just to write a lede. Microsoft Hires Sam Altman Hours After OpenAI Rejects His Return. “The board of directors of OpenAI, the high-flying artificial intelligence start-up, said in a note to employees on Sunday night that its former chief, Sam Altman, would not be returning to his job, while naming his second interim replacement in two days. / Hours later, in another head-spinning move, Microsoft said it was hiring Mr. Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and a company co-founder who quit in solidarity with Mr. Altman. The two men will lead an advanced research lab at Microsoft. / At OpenAI, Emmett Shear, the former chief executive of Twitch, will replace Mira Murati as interim chief, the board said. Ms. Murati, a longtime OpenAI executive, had been appointed to that role after Mr. Altman’s ouster on Friday. The board said Mr. Shear has a ‘unique mix of skills, expertise and relationships that will drive OpenAI forward,’ according to the memo viewed by The New York Times. At Microsoft, Satya Nadella, the tech giant’s chief executive, said that Mr. Altman would be chief executive of the new research lab, ‘setting a new pace for innovation.'” (We’ll need that just to keep up with this story.)
+ Karen Hao and Charlie Warzel break it down in The Atlantic (Gift Article): Inside the Chaos at OpenAI. “OpenAI was deliberately structured to resist the values that drive much of the tech industry—a relentless pursuit of scale, a build-first-ask-questions-later approach to launching consumer products. It was founded in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to the creation of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that should benefit ‘humanity as a whole’ … This tenuous equilibrium broke one year ago almost to the day, according to current and former employees, thanks to the release of the very thing that brought OpenAI to global prominence: ChatGPT.” Now both ChatGPT and humanity have been sidelined. Clippy is back in charge.
