Why should we trust you?
You shouldn't.
No one person should be trusted here, the board can fire me.
I think that's important.
Those words would come back to haunt Sam Altman, the CEO of the hottest startup in tech.
Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI being forced out by the board.
This is, of course, the company at the center of the artificial intelligence boom.
Essentially a coup of sorts,
a huge backlash,
and now we're talking about a possible return.
OpenAI was founded with one stated mission: to build
a superintelligence that is safe and benefits all humanity.
It also appeared to be the reason why Sam Altman was fired:
for chasing the money at the expense of the mission.
My initial reaction was, wait, what?
But ironically, that failed palace coup may have had exactly the opposite effect.
We saw basically the forces of capitalism assert themselves
in a way that was kind of breathtaking.
OpenAI
was set up in 2015, essentially by Sam Altman and Elon Musk,
and the thinking was Google is growing very fast.
Google has lots of AI investment.
There should be a competitor.
Crucially, it was a nonprofit:
the idea being that its AI wasn't developed with monetary incentives in mind.
And some of the leadership adheres to a belief system called "effective altruism".
It's a pseudo-philosophical movement that has gained real traction in Silicon Valley.
Effective altruists aim to save the most lives or reduce the most suffering, often
by making vast amounts of money that they then donate. A few years
in, Musk leaves and around the same time, OpenAI's approach changes.
It shifted in 2019 into what's known as a capped profit company, meaning
it intends to make money.
But after a certain point, overflow that additional money into its nonprofit arm.
It brings a complicated new organizational structure. The governance structure of OpenAI is
weird.
Most startups are governed by a board that is accountable to their shareholders.
OpenAI is a startup, but it sits inside of this nonprofit,
and that nonprofit board of directors is not accountable to the shareholders.
It's accountable to humanity.
But the new structure
lets it take outside investment without, in theory at least, compromising the mission.
Developing cutting edge AI is extremely expensive.
The huge computing power OpenAI needed could only be provided by a few companies.
Taking investment from one of them
solved several problems.
Microsoft came in as an investor and it's the single largest
investors. It's invested roughly $13 billion in OpenAI.
A lot of that happened before
most of the world had even heard of OpenAI.
And then, this.
This is ChatGPT.
When ChatGPT was released in late November of 2022, there was an immediate shift
in how people were talking about and thinking about AI.
Everyone's using it. It's all over my social feeds.
That really catalyzed a big shift in the industry
that has carried forward throughout all of 2023.
As ChatGPT takes off, so does the profile of Sam Altman.
That made his firing all the more surprising.
This crazy weekend in mid-November
is probably the wildest thing that's happened in tech.
I don't know, in ten years or something.
A press release goes out and it says that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has been replaced.
And not only has he been replaced by the board of directors,
but it includes information to suggest that he did something very wrong.
The chronology of it is astonishing.
Sources say Sam Altman found out he was being fired
as CEO minutes before he was fired as CEO.
It's not just journalists who are surprised.
Microsoft, as we understand it, was completely blindsided.
We don't think that they found out much earlier than we did.
Sam Altman's fired and then immediately his investors
start agitating for OpenAI to bring him back.
You had investors making threats, you had employees threatening to resign,
and then finally you had Satya Nadella essentially hiring Sam Altman to start,
you know, some sort of AI thing inside of Microsoft.
Even though at the time of Altman's initial ousting, Microsoft wasn't on its board,
it became very clear very fast that the company has a huge influence over OpenAI.
This all culminated late Tuesday night when OpenAI put out a post on X
saying that it had reached a agreement in principle, for Altman to return.
The story that emerges is not one of malfeasance or misbehavior or anything like that.
What emerges is kind of an ideological dispute
between these two factions. One that essentially
says that we need to have AI accelerate
as quickly as possible because it's going to bring lots of benefit to humanity.
And then the other faction says, no, no, these technologies are too dangerous.
We have to stop them from eradicating the human race.
But at the same time, someone has to pay to develop this tech.
That's why alliances are formed around a few dominant firms.
What you've seen emerge is these major tech companies
having either their own AI arms
or they're partnering up with different companies. Microsoft's relationship
with OpenAI differs from some of its competitors because it doesn't own the company outright.
There's Meta AI Research,
led by the AI luminary Yann Lecun.
Google has DeepMind, which it acquired a number of years ago.
For a time,
Amazon was somewhat out in the cold,
but it has since forged a supplier relationship with Anthropic.
Anthropic is essentially a bunch of OpenAI engineers who got worried that,
you know, that these guys were going too far, they weren't being careful enough.
These alliances are significant because AI is for now a cloud product.
These tech companies might not be making
tons of money off of the AI products per se, but they will be making money
from their customers who are paying for the compute services for it.
And that compute
power sits in the cloud, which is a big business for Microsoft, Amazon and Google.
It's also extremely profitable. Consider this. Amazon's cloud business
has made a cumulative profit of $55 billion over the past three years.
Everything else it does combined have made profit of just $5 billion.
That's why everyone wants to get into AI. And it presents a huge risk for Microsoft.
These tensions that caused Sam Altman's departure are not going away.
And this is so important for Microsoft's business.
You can't have, the entire future of this multi-trillion dollar company
dependent on some crazy nonprofit run by some ideologues
who kind of seem to subscribe to a, you know, belief system called effective altruism.
The counterpoint to this is ensuring that OpenAI's obligation
to humanity doesn't just disappear, particularly when it comes
to taking people's jobs or creating a deluge of misinformation.
And Microsoft, which is answerable to shareholders, looks
set to wield a lot more direct influence at the startup.
Sam Altman, the co-founder and ousted leader, will now return to OpenAI
as CEO. It looks like the board is changing up as well.
That new board composition faced immediate criticism for its lack of diversity.
It could ultimately include as many as 12 new members, and negotiations from the get go
have included the possibility of Microsoft having some of those seats.
Yeah, I mean, I think we definitely will want some governance changes. Surprises are bad.
The move from OpenAI to rein in its thrusting
CEO had failed. And rather than diluting the profit imperative,
some worry that it may have diluted the safety concerns.
It's kind of tempting to see this as the end of this, very simplistic
maybe way of thinking about AI, which is that, if we don't control it,
it could get out of control. But those beliefs aren't going away.
So this tension is going to continue no matter what happens with OpenAI.
It's going to be with us as the AI industry matures.
And I would predict it's going to be with us for a long time.