Sam Altman’s sudden exit has ripples through openai
Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, and Mira Murati, an architect of the next big tech startups: a journey to self-destruction
Sam Altman, who as CEO of OpenAI gave the world ChatGPT and became one of the most influential people in technology, has departed the company after losing the confidence of its board.
A review found that he was not always candid with his communications with the board, which made it difficult for it to exercise its responsibilities. Mira has been appointed as interim CEO as Openai searches for a full-time replacement.
The surprising capabilities of ChatGPT, such as solving complex puzzles and handling questions that appear to require human-like reasoning, stunned AI researchers, amazed the public, and triggered an arms race among big tech companies to build more powerful AI. The bot’s success turned Altman into a tech celebrity, consulted by world leaders on the future path of AI technology.
Altman acknowledged that success wasn’t certain, but he expressed confidence that AI would ultimately be beneficial, describing the technology as his life’s work, from childhood. He said that this will be the most beneficial technology mankind has ever invented.
“We’re on a path to self-destruction as a species right now,” he said, sitting alongside executives from Meta and Google. We need a new technology that will allow us to grow for hundreds, thousands and millions of years more.
Mira Murati is a person. My background is in engineering, and I worked in aerospace, automotive, VR, and AR. At both companies I did work on applications of AI in the real world, one of which wasLeap Motion. I very quickly believed that AGI would be the last and most important major technology that we built, and I wanted to be at the heart of it. Open AI was the only organization at the time that was incentivized to work on the capabilities of AI technology and also make sure that it goes well. When I joined in 2018, I began working on our supercomputing strategy and managing a couple of research teams.
GPT-3 – A Non-profit Organization Reorganized into a Non-Profit Organization and Growing Millions of Dollars a Year Later
It is hard to remember the big-deal moments. We live in the future, and we see crazy things every day. I remember GPT-3 being able to translate. I speak three languages: Italian, Albanian and English. I had created pair of English and Italian prompts. Even though we never trained it to translate in Italian, it was able to do it fairly well.
You were at OpenAI early enough to be there when it changed from a pure nonprofit to reorganizing so that a for-profit entity lived inside the structure. What did you think about that?
It was not something that was done lightly. You have to deploy the models at scale to really understand how to make them better. That costs money. It requires you to have a business plan, because your generous nonprofit donors aren’t going to give billions like investors would. As far as I know, there’s no other structure like this. The key thing was protecting the mission of the nonprofit.
The Sutskever Dispute in Accuracy Research at the Fermilab Tevatron Energy Reactor (RHIC)
According to Brockman, Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist and a member of the board, told Altman that he was being fired. Accounts from inside the company say that a disagreement between Sutskever and Altman centered on the direction of the company and how it can build more capable artificial intelligence safety.
According to the report, Sutskever told employees at an emergency all-hands meeting that the board was doing its duty to help all of humanity.
Openai refused to give a further comment on the situation. They didn’t respond to requests for comment. Inquiries sent to the three researchers who quit also went unanswered.
