Sam Altman has been re-hired as its chief executive

OpenAI is Bound by Silicon Valley Rules: Sam Altman, CEO and the Censor of the OpenAI Foundation, Loses His Job

The recent turmoil at Openai has created a buzz in the technology industry and kept entrepreneurs, journalists, and anyone that still has an X account closely monitoring their timelines for the latest updates. In the meantime, some of the most prominent AI companies—including OpenAI—continued to do what Silicon Valley is known for: Drop new products.

I can’t say whether Altman’s conduct truly endangered OpenAI’s mission, but I do know this: The board seems to have missed the possibility that a poorly explained execution of a beloved and charismatic leader might harm that mission. The directors appear to have thought that they would give Altman his walking papers and unfussily slot in a replacement. The consequences were immediate and volcanic. Altman, already something of a cult hero, became even revered in this new narrative. The uproar that followed was not deterred by him. It was correct to dismiss him because of his effort to get his job back. Sam is still working on something. All of Silicon Valley blew up, which hurts OpenAI’s status permanently.

There have been two signal events recently in A.I. One of them you’ve heard about. The nonprofit that governs OpenAI, the makers of ChatGPT, fired Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive. The decision was unexpected and largely unexplained. “Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” read a cryptic statement.

Artificial intelligence researchers and scientists fear that the machine can’t turn off. The story goes something like this: A powerful A.I. is developed. Its designers are thrilled, then unsettled, then terrified. They go to pull the plug, only to learn the A.I. has copied its code elsewhere, perhaps everywhere.

OpenAI: A New Board of Directors? The Fire That Killed Sam Altman: After a Month of Ruling, OpenAI Is Back

Openai said that an agreement in principle had been reached for Sam to return as CEO with the addition of a new initial board made up of Larry Summers and Adam D’Angelo. We are going to figure it out. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

The company, maker of the popular ChatGPT, said it would also create a new board of directors. This comes after the former board voted to fire Altman as CEO late last week.

Sutskever did not appreciate it when I joked that the bizarre org chart that mapped out this relationship looked like something a future GPT might come up with when prompted to design a tax dodge. “We are the only company in the world which has a capped profit structure,” he admonished me. “Here is the reason it makes sense: If you believe, like we do, that if we succeed really well, then these GPUs are going to take my job and your job and everyone’s jobs, it seems nice if that company would not make truly unlimited amounts of returns.” To keep an eye on things, there is a board to make sure the profit-seeking part of the company doesn’t shirk its commitment to make sure that the AI doesn’t get out of control.

The same board that fired Sam Altman said it no longer had confidence in his ability to lead, because he was not consistently candid in his communications with them. No one at the company knew of the firing until a few hours before it was made public. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and other investors got no advance notice. The four directors, representing a majority of the six-person board, also kicked OpenAI president and chairman Greg Brockman off the board. Brockman stepped down quickly.

The unexpected firing of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, was followed by an avalanche of new AI features from competitors, including Anthropic and Stable Diffusion. On Tuesday afternoon, in the midst of turmoil, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT with voice capabilities for free to all users. This was only for paid users and was pre-released in September. Now the update is more widespread.

Anthropic’s latest model, Claude 2.1, was given two key updates. One is the ability to upload more data at once to the chatbot and fewer lies. The token limit for Claude is now set at 200,000 tokens, which is approximately the length of a 500 page book. You have to wait until the future updates to analyze all of War and Peace in a single prompt. To compare, the rate limit for the GPT-4 Turbo model, announced by Altman pre-firing, is capped at 128,000.

And, Anthropic claims that the new Claude is more likely to admit when it’s unsure of an answer, rather than fibbing with the utmost confidence. “We tested Claude 2.1’s honesty by curating a large set of complex, factual questions that probe known weaknesses in current models,” reads the company’s blog post. It’s a major issue for chatbot, because of lack of veracity.

When openAI discovered Stable Video Diffusion and Claude 2.1 (with an overview of HubSpot and OpenAI), it was a surprise

When you input a prompt into a text-to-video model, the AI spits out GIF-like animations that can range from eerily beautiful to downright disturbing. In addition to text-to-video capabilities, Stable Video Diffusion can transform your still images into videos by adding motion.

While this isn’t technically a new feature from OpenAI, the company rolled out ChatGPT with voice capabilities to everyone in the short period while Altman was out as CEO. The feature was restricted only to users who paid for the service.

It’s not yet giving Spike Jonze’s Her, but the software developers at OpenAI took another big step towards their goal of “multimodality” by giving the chatbot the ability to hold a conversation with you. The idea is that a chatbot can be even more powerful if it can accept inputs and provide outputs in multiple mediums, like voice, text, and images. Who knows when it’ll learn how to smell.

“Feels like every week, there’s something new being launched or announced from one of the major players. The launches of Stable Video Diffusion and Claude 2.1 were likely just a coincidence according to the CTO and co-founder of HubSpot, which is also an OpenAI shareholder.