Certainly, until yesterday, the most important event in San Francisco was the APEC Summit. Political leaders from South Korea, Japan, China, and the United States all attended in person, and various businesspeople participated and talked about their visions and achievements. Certainly, until Thursday, important news and various incidents took our attention: who did Chinese President Xi Jinping have dinner with? Biden praising Chinese cars? President Yoon Seok-yeol meeting with Prime Minister Kishida? Sam Altman of OpenAI raising additional funds for AI? Tesla's Elon Musk not attending the summit opening speech.
But a single post on a website on Friday turned everyone's attention elsewhere in San Francisco.
CTO Myra Murati has been named interim CEO to lead OpenAI; Sam Altman is leaving the company.
In fact, the reason for this resignation is very simple. I don't know why they brought up such provocative content as the younger sister and the coup, but the content has already been made public clearly and transparently.
OpenAI's founding purpose
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Ilya Sutskever with the goal of promoting the safe development of artificial intelligence and benefiting humanity .
And as we all know, this vision and Elon Musk had significant differences of opinion, which led to friction with the management of OpenAI. This later led to Elon Musk's opposition to Grok and OpenAI.
With the announcement of GPT-3.5 and chatGPT, OpenAI needed additional funding. Microsoft invested a total of $10 billion in OpenAI, taking its stake to 49%. At the time, OpenAI’s shareholding structure was as follows:
"Once that happens, ownership would shift to a more standard 49% for Microsoft, 49% for other investors, and 2% for OpenAI's nonprofit parent."
To begin with, Sam Altman had no stock and no voting rights. MS respected OpenAI as much as possible, leaving decision-making and operations entirely to the board, whether Satya Nadella directly mentioned it or not.
The composition of the Board of Directors is as follows:
OpenAI side
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI
Greg Brockman, President and CEO of OpenAI
Wojciech Zaremba, Chief Researcher at OpenAI
Ilya Sutskever, Chief Scientist at OpenAI
Outside Director
Quora CEO, Adam D'Angelo
GeoSim Systems CEO, Tasha McCauley
Helen Toner, Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology
At the moment when the decision to dismiss Sam, which is currently a hot topic, was made, Greg was in France to discuss the fund with President Macron, and Sam was also out on an extended investment project at APEC. And on Friday afternoon, the dismissal of Sam as CEO and Greg as chairman were passed.
The reason for the dismissal stated by the board is "inconsistent communication, hiding some information ." The market's reaction is questionable. Why are they firing Sam Altman, the icon of OpenAI, who is doing well and making a lot of money? He got a lot of attention when he announced GPTs at DevDay a while ago?
Actually, the reason is simple. There are various stories about a security incident, a sister, and corruption, but Ilya Sutskever has already officially explained the reason in an interview with The Information.
The interesting thing is that Ilya was recruited by Elon Musk, and he had the same conflict with Elon Musk. At that time (2019), he also had a war of words with Elon Musk, who was trying to pursue profit through AI. It is already known that Ilya is a representative disciple of Professor Geoffrey Hinton and inherited the philosophy of AGI.
Literally, Ilya keeps saying that he acknowledges the risks and limitations of the current GPT model in order to become AGI, and that there are things that need to be done before commercialization. (This is also revealed in the interview he conducted on November 4, 2023.) To put it bluntly, Ilya is closer to an idealist. He says that he will focus on R&D and ensuring stability rather than managing the company for now in order to develop an AI model that can be used universally as AGI.
He says that he knows it is not the right decision for him and his business, but he did it for the purpose of establishing OpenAI. Many people in the AI scene will remember that when OpenAI released the GPT-4 Tech Report, people called it Closed AI as a sarcastic remark. This is because OpenAI, which had previously shown truly open activities by releasing papers and source codes up to GPT-3 and DALLE-2, is no longer releasing them.
It's a shame that someone as bright and smart as Sam Altman is on a wild ride and then the brakes are put on. It feels like something is about to end right when things are getting fun. But I personally have a romantic feeling that OpenAI will be able to open up new horizons by releasing and announcing research again.
Broadly speaking, the directions OpenAI could take are as follows:
OpenAI allocates more resources to AI research and development
Shifting focus to AI safety and ethical aspects
Re-evaluating commercialization strategy under new leadership
Increased focus on user data protection and ethical use of AI
Strengthening AI education and awareness campaigns targeting the general public
Personally, I think there will be new collaborations with Andrew Ng, Geoffrey Hinton, etc. in this process. Sam Altman's heroic story has ended, but the romance of OpenAI's AGI is not over yet. This story may only be the beginning.
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