The OpenAI Saga, AI Shortcomings and Apple’s Opportunity
Happy Monday.
The tech news flow had no interest in taking a breather ahead of Thanksgiving this year.
In today’s update, we will talk about the OpenAI situation which is still unfolding as of Monday afternoon. There are some connections to Apple when it comes to the broader AI space.
Let's jump into today's update.
The OpenAI Saga
There are some tech news stories that simply need time to pass before taking a deep dive into them. That applies to OpenAI, the AI start-up responsible for kicking off the generative AI buzz/hype cycle with ChatGPT. Some of the OpenAI drama ends up being irrelevant to these updates. However, there is enough here, especially with Microsoft’s involvement that would be of interest to Apple. Once more time passes, we can revisit the takeaways.
Here’s a very quick recap of what happened.
This past Friday, OpenAI's board fired co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. As part of the board’s decision, co-founder Greg Brockman, who was Open AI’s chairman and president, was booted off the board. He quit instead. This kicked off something of a social-media fueled frenzy involving Altman and Brockman trying to return to OpenAI via an employee and investor uprising. Instead, both announced they would head to Microsoft. OpenAI employees are now pledging to do the same.
Here are a few of my prevailing thoughts:
1) Blindspot. In what may end up being the biggest lesson from this drama, Sam Altman had a major blindspot in terms of not having firm control over the OpenAI board. While there is an unusual governance hierarchy at play when it comes to the OpenAI board and its responsibilities (described below), Altman should have known that the possibility of being fired existed. This was not a Black Swan event, although most will say it was. The fact that the OpenAI board was not reinforced after key departures (Reid Hoffman etc.) to be closely aligned with Altman was a huge mistake on his part.
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