The dream of AI in everyone's interest has been shattered
Sam Altman once wanted to create artificial intelligence for the benefit of mankind. Then came the billions from Microsoft. In the religious war that divides the AI scene, he has prevailed: quick profits now come before safety.
When Sam Altman received a text message from his technology boss and co-founder Ilya Sutskever last Friday, he had no idea that his last day at OpenAI had just begun. Sutskever wanted to know if he could take part in a video call at lunchtime. At the meeting, Sutskever and the rest of his supervisory board told Altman that he was fired. His accounts were blocked immediately afterwards. According to US media reports.
Altman's dismissal sent shockwaves through the US tech scene, if not worldwide. After all, the ChatGPT developer is not just any startup, but the figurehead of the AI revolution. And its founder and boss Sam Altman is its face. After the employees openly rebelled and threatened to defect to the largest investor Microsoft or join the competition, the regulators relented. After tough negotiations, Altman has now triumphantly returned as CEO - just a few days after being fired. Peace has now returned to what is perhaps the most important technology company in the USA. But it remains deceptive.
Tech analysts, journalists and investors are still puzzling over what exactly happened at OpenAI. Even the AI company doesn't know and wants to have the events investigated by external investigators. One thing is clear: for some, Sam Altman has sacrificed his noble mission for big money. For others, he has become the target of hyper-cautious and incompetent supervisors. He may have won the power struggle with his internal opponents. But his dream of artificial intelligence being developed free from the commercial interests of the tech giants for the benefit of mankind will probably have to be buried with the drama at OpenAI.
Balancing act between saving the world and commerce
This was precisely the ambition with which Altman founded his start-up in San Francisco in 2015. The altruistic idea manifested itself in the name: OpenAI, open and transparent. The same applies to the form: the groundbreaking software of the start-up is still formally backed by a non-profit research organization rather than a profit-oriented company.
However, Altman was not able to maintain this claim for long: From 2019, Microsoft invested a total of up to 13 billion dollars and secured the exclusive rights to the AI artists' programs in return. OpenAI founded a profit-oriented subsidiary specifically for this purpose, although its profits are capped.
Since then, OpenAI has been stuck in a unique, one might say strange, structure: investors worth billions, as is common in Silicon Valley, have no say whatsoever on OpenAI's supervisory board. And Altman is performing a balancing act: developing artificial intelligence for the benefit of humanity and with an eye on security. And at the same time expanding his non-profit into a billion-dollar business.
Doomsday hysteria or technology hype?
A deep rift ran through OpenAI long before Altman was sacked. As early as 2021, some AI researchers led by Dario Amodei left the company and founded AnthropicAI, Altman's biggest competitor today - for fear that their former boss had lost sight of the risks of the groundbreaking technology. Thanks to the deal with Microsoft, Altman was able to put more and more money and computing power into the programs. "We believed that you need more than just more and more powerful models: an adjustment to human values - security," Amodei later explained his departure to Fortune.
His departure was an alarm signal that the religious war raging in the AI scene had long since reached OpenAI: on the one side are the doomsayers who see artificial intelligence as a potentially god-like machine that could one day get out of control and wipe out humanity like animals. At least three of the supervisors who have now been fired belong to this faction. Sutskever is also said to have doubted whether Altman still had the noble mission of OpenAI in mind.
The optimists consider these doomsday scenarios to be exaggerated. For them, AI is perhaps the most important invention of mankind, with huge potential benefits for billions. "We got to this point because insignificant, tiny risks were hysterically inflated by the exotic views of sci-fi nerds and a click-addicted media," commented venture capital veteran Vinod Khosla, one of the earliest open AI investors, on Altman's dismissal.
Profit interests of internet giants now dominate
At OpenAI, these two factions - hyper-cautious supervisors and profit-oriented major investors - have been fighting a hidden battle for a long time. Last week it just broke out into the open. The exact trigger remains unclear. Altman had "not been consistently honest in his communication with the Supervisory Board" and had thus "impeded its ability to perform its duties", the press release on his dismissal states vaguely.
This could be related to the investor tour in the Middle East that Altman had been on for weeks, according to media reports, in order to mobilize new money for cheap chips that OpenAI needs for its models. The basis of trust between the charismatic CEO, to whom the investors were attached, and his supervisors has apparently continued to erode - possibly because his course became too commercial for them.
OpenAI's supervisory board may have only done what it is mandated to do: pull the ripcord when it sees OpenAI's non-profit mission in danger. The irony is that the "incompetent" supervisors, as the OpenAI employees called them in their protest letter, have almost ruined the entire company in the process. And thus paved the way for commercialization all the more.
Three of the four critical, more security-oriented supervisors who fired Altman are now themselves being kicked off the supervisory board. Instead, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Bret Taylor - ex-head of Salesforce and a proven Altman confidant - are coming on board. Taylor will also become Chairman of the Supervisory Board. Altman has thus installed controllers who are sympathetic to his faster, more commercial course and should give him "the necessary resources for success", as Microsoft boss Satya Nadella has requested. In addition, up to six more new supervisors are to be installed, who may represent the interests of billion-dollar donors more strongly. They will soon decide how charitable the biggest technology revolution in human history really is.
Source: www.ntv.de
