© The Indian Express Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, in a post on X on Monday (November 20), said the company has hired OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to lead a “new advanced AI research team”. The announcement came just hours after OpenAI’s board of directors said Altman would not be returning to his job and Emmett Shear, the former chief executive of Twitch, will replace Mira Murati as interim chief executive of the OpenAI.
The sudden ouster of Altman blindsided not only OpenAI’s employees but also its biggest investors like Microsoft. Media reports suggested that investors weren’t given advance warning or opportunity to weigh in on the board’s decision to remove Altman, the poster boy for the generative AI revolution.
The recent turn of events once again brought OpenAI under the spotlight. It first broke into the mainstream after the launch of the chatbot ChatGPT, which took the world by storm. Here is a look at how the organisation was established, who runs it, and what are its goals.
The start
OpenAI was set up in December 2015 as a non-profit AI research organisation whose goal was to develop “artificial general intelligence,” or AGI, which is essentially software that’s as smart as humans.
Moreover, the organisation said it wanted to ensure that AGI “benefits all of humanity” and no big tech company, like Google, would master the technology and monopolise its benefits.
“We want the benefits of, access to, and governance of AGI to be widely and fairly shared,” OpenAI’s website mentioned.
Among its founding members were Altman, Brockman, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, Amazon Web Services, Infosys, rightwing tech billionaire Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. They collectively pledged a whopping $ 1 billion to the venture.
The evolution
Around two years after its inception, OpenAI released a report titled ‘Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training,’ which introduced the idea of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPTs). A GPT is a neural network, or a machine learning model, which functions like a human brain and is trained on input, such as large data sets, to produce outputs, meaning answers to users’ questions.
In order to build on its idea, the organisation had to incur infrastructure and compensation costs, making it a difficult task to run OpenAI as a non-profit.
Therefore, in 2019, “OpenAI ‘transitioned’ into two organisations: a ‘capped-profit’ organisation called OpenAI Global LLC (in which the return on any investment was capped at 100 times the original amount); and OpenAI Inc, the non-profit sole controlling shareholder in OpenAI Global LLC,” wrote John Naughton, an Irish academic, journalist and author, in his recent article published by The Guardian.
Altman got $ 1 billion in funding from Microsoft, which agreed to licence and commercialise some of OpenAI’s technology.
Notably, even after establishing a for-profit subsidiary, OpenAI continued to work towards its core mission: to control the development of AGI to “benefit all humanity”. This meant that all the investors and employees were subject to that mission above anything else, including the for-profit company, a report by CNBC said.
The breakout
OpenAI made headlines in November last year after it released a free preview of ChatGPT, which was based on the GPT-3.5 architecture. More than a million people signed up for the preview in the first five days, according to OpenAI, making it a huge success.
The following weeks only increased the interest in ChatGPT, helping Altman and OpenAI secure a place at the adult table of the technology industry. The co-founder became a “darling of the mainstream media and an honoured invitee to the corridors of western power,” wrote Naughton.
The crisis
The success, however, sparked tensions among OpenAI’s top leadership, i.e. board members. According to a media report, members like Ilya Sutskever, an AI researcher and one of the co-founders of OpenAI, were increasingly worried about the potential dangers that the company’s technology posed to society. They also felt that Altman wasn’t focusing enough on these risks and was more concerned about building OpenAI’s business.
On November 18, the rift culminated with the ouster of Altman. But how did it happen? Unlike other private companies, OpenAI’s board of directors have the power to decide the company’s leadership without the influence of its investors.
Sutskever banded together with other board members including Adam D’Angelo (CEO of Q&A forum Quora), Tasha McCauley (entrepreneur), and Helen Toner (an AI safety researcher at Georgetown University) and sacked Altman, who was also on the board but didn’t have the majority to overturn the decision. Another board member was Greg Brockman, president and co-founder of OpenAI, but he wasn’t part of the decision-making process. He quit after Altman was dismissed.
On Monday, more than 500 of OpenAI’s 770 employees signed an open letter calling on the board to resign. The letter accused the board of being “incapable of overseeing OpenAI”.
It added: “We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgement and care for our mission and employees.” The signatories said they may resign and go to work for Altman and a newly formed subsidiary of Microsoft.
