OpenAI has had a rough couple of weeks. It imploded, then un-imploded in a fast-moving social media soap opera. Elon Musk, the lead benefactor and a co-founder of the organisation (who quit in 2018), tweeted about Board Member Ilya Sutskever: ‘Something scared Ilya enough to fire Sam [Altman CEO]. What was it?’ At the recent UK Artificial Intelligence Safety Summit, Musk also said, ‘AI could kill us all.’ So, we should be paying attention.
OpenAI is a US-based not-for-profit research organisation founded in 2015 to collaboratively build ‘value for everyone rather than shareholders’ through the development of AI. It was established to share ideas and technology with other technology companies for the benefit of mankind. That seems nice. I suppose technology has been very handy for those sections of humanity that can afford it.
Let’s not focus on the near 40% (3 billion+) of the world’s population that have never had the chance to use the internet. Let’s talk about how artificial intelligence will be doing, well, stuff that we (humans) can do – only much better. This would sound ominous, except OpenAI, as I mentioned, is a not-for-profit organisation, not your typical rapacious Silicon Valley money machine. We can all calm down; they aren’t driven by filthy cash; they have higher ideals.
Except the not-for-profit, who’s stated ‘primary fiduciary duty is to humanity’ opened a for-profit company called OpenAI Global LLC, and that’s as rapacious as it gets, with a $10 billion investment from Microsoft in 2023 at a valuation of $26 billion.
The rumoured next round values the company at $80 billion. No company gets that kind of valuation if it intends to give away and collaborate with other companies for free to enhance mankind’s well-being. You get that valuation because you intend to make an obscene amount of money. So much for the not-for-profit gaslighting.
The Board of OpenAI, in what was a shock to everyone, including Microsoft, fired CEO Sam Altman for not being ‘consistently candid in his communications with the Board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.’ This is a company that has already ‘changed everything,’ which half of us believe is the beginning of the end, and the other half thinks is the end of the beginning for humanity. So out went Altman, then he wasn’t out, then he was out along with 738 of the 770 staff who supported him. Then he was in again, and now, ‘there’s nothing to see here.’
Except there certainly is. Artificial Intelligence is not the stated goal of OpenAI; something called ‘artificial general intelligence’ or AGI is. It is a ‘highly autonomous system that outperforms humans at most economically valuable work.’
There were mutterings of this type of advancement with GPT-4 in early 2023 that were shut down by OpenAI peers for being more ‘sci-fi’ rather than ‘sci.’ In mid-October this year, the company quietly updated its website to reflect the AGI core focus.
One week before Altman was sacked, he described AGI as ‘magic intelligence in the sky.’ The day before he was ousted, he referenced being ‘in the room’ when the company pushed ‘the veil of ignorance back and the frontier of discovery forward.’ Whatever happened after he said that the OpenAI board completely lost it and axed him without even consulting the $10 billion elephant in the room, Microsoft. There was, and may well still be, a battle raging at the top of one of the most powerful technology companies on the planet.
Elon Musk tweeted last week: ‘If OpenAI is doing something potentially dangerous to humanity, the world needs to know.’ Altman needs to end his salesman schtick and tell us exactly what’s going on.
