The Chaos Of OpenAI: Why Sam Altman Was Fired & Rehired in 4 days!

#openai #samaltman #chatgpt
OpenAI was initially founded in 2015 by some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful and influential men. The founding team included Sam Altman the ex-head of the most successful startup incubator in history y-combinator, Elon Musk the world’s richest man, CEO of Tesla and founder of SpaceX, Reid Hoffman the Billionaire founder of LinkedIn and Peter Thiel one of the most powerful investors in Silicon Valley and the first investor to invest in Facebook turning his $500 000 initial investment into billions of Dollars.
Apart from wealthy and influential figures of Silicon Valley, OpenAI’s founding team also included some of the smartest minds in computing such as Ilya Sutskever who before founding OpenAI was working on cutting each AI research at Google’s Brain project, and Greg Brockman the former CTO of Stripe one of the largest online payment processors in the world.
Its latest product ChatGPT Plus costs $20 per month. In addition, OpenAI is no longer a non-profit, receiving $10 Billion in investment from Microsoft, the world’s most valuable company. This privatization of OpenAI led to Elon Musk, one of its founders, suing it for betraying its founding mission. This reached a critical point when OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was fired in November 2023 following an orchestrated ousting by a high-ranking OpenAI employee but this wouldn’t last for long as Sam Altman would be rehired just a few days later. its various founders pledged over $1 billion to the venture. Although only 10% of that money would ultimately be collected, it was more than enough of a war chest to fund OpenAIs ambitious projects. In 2016 they released “OpenAI Gym'' which was a platform for reinforcement learning and a year later in 2017 they released a bot for DOTA 2 that was capable of beating top DOTA players. In 2018 Trouble began to brew in the organization when following Tesla’s poaching of top OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy, Elon Musk resigned from the board of directors of OpenAI citing a “conflict of interest” which Sam Altman contradicted claiming that Musk believed OpenAI had fallen behind other players like Google and that Musk had proposed to take over OpenAI himself, which the board rejected. Musk in anger chooses to resign from OpenAI.
Soon after Elon’s departure, OpenAI would undergo a transformation going from a non-profit to a capped for-profit company. This structure allowed for investment into OpenAI but capped the return on investment to 100 times the initial investment. The first investor under this new structure was Microsoft who invested $1 Billion. OpenAI’s main reason for doing this was to raise capital to pay its employees more money so that they could retain the best engineering talent in the field of AI, stopping them from going to big tech firms like Google and Facebook which were offering very lucrative compensation packages for top AI talent. They followed this up with the release of DALE in 2021 a text-to-image model developed using deep learning methodologies to generate digital images from natural language descriptions, while the first version of DALE was a little rough around the edges its latest iteration is mindblowing, dramatically reducing the skill a person needs to create beautiful imagery, converting a few words into images in real-time something that takes a graphic designer hours to do.
Then in 2022, OpenAI broke the internet when they released ChatGPT, an AI Chatbot that would become the fastest-growing app in the history of the internet. Amassing over 100 million users in just 2 months. OpenAI was on a blazing path to AI dominance since its transformation into a capped for-profit company projecting revenues of $200 million in 2023 and $1 Billion in 2024 but this still wasn’t enough for OpenAI’s ambitious goals. In January 2023 it was announced that OpenAI was in talks with potential investors to raise capital, just a few months later in March of 2024 OpenAI announced a $10 Billion investment from Microsoft the deal made Microsoft a 49% shareholder in OpenAI and gave them the right to 75% of its profits until their investment had been paid back.
This more lenient approach to AI safety began to worry senior members of OpenAI, the most prominent of which was Ilya Sutskever, its Chief Scientist.
Ilya Sutskever accused Sam Altman of not being transparent with the Board of OpenAI and lying about certain things that were going on at openAI. So he approached the board with his concerns and began to orchestrate the ousting of Sam Altman as CEO, his plan was initially successful until it was revealed that the majority of the OpenAI employees were not on board with this decision the internal anger was so intense that just a few days after he was fired Sam Altman was rehired.

[@victorgw]

Sweet Vid! The Sam Altman hiring and firing saga was quite crazy

[@victorn5179]

Fantastice Vid!

[@Tech_History_Channel]

Thanks!

[@sabrfeder]

much more complicated!😎