Posted on 11/17/2023 5:58:43 PM PST by FarCenter
Chief gets upgraded to customer – LLMs may be coming for your job but the board came for his
UPDATED OpenAI's board of directors just fired CEO Sam Altman for not being "consistently candid in his communications."
CTO Mira Murati has been appointed as the interim CEO to lead the lab in the meantime as the board finds a new boss.
In a statement Friday, the board of directors said: "OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam's many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward."
Altman, an OpenAI co-founder, was ousted after the board carried out a probe and concluded he had not been completely honest and forthright in his conversations with the directors, leading to a lack of confidence in his abilities to continue as CEO.
The move comes as a shock. Launched in 2015 as a non-profit focused on fostering artificial general intelligence with the short-lived backing of Elon Musk and a culture of openness, Altman transformed the upstart into a secretive for-profit biz. A number of OpenAI staffers later hit eject, and got together to form rival AI lab Anthropic, we note.
OpenAI is seen as a leader in generative AI technology, and was the first outfit to commercialize large language models in a big way with its GPT family.
Since then, OpenAI has developed many other types of AI models with other generative capabilities, such as its text-to-image DALL-E, code-writing Codex used in GitHub Copilot, and more – including ChatGPT, its most well-known product.
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Nothing seemed amiss as Altman announced various services and updates during the US-based lab's first developer conference this month. Prior to this, he was flying around the globe talking to world leaders about the upsides and downsides of AI as governments work towards crafting policy to regulate the technology. On Thursday, Altman showed up at the high-profile Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference in San Francisco, attended by US President Joe Biden and China's President Xi Jinping.
On Twitter, Altman said: "I loved my time at OpenAI. It was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. Most of all I loved working with such talented people ... [I] will have more to say about what’s next later."
But behind closed doors, it must have been a different story for the board to dump him. Perhaps it had something to do with the massive costs involved in training and running powerful state-of-the-art models, and feeding them with training data sourced from the internet as well as the need to put guardrails around the output.
Perhaps it had to do with Altman constantly crying about the potential for AI to destroy society, fears some experts have said are overblown, and heralding a general form of artificial intelligence no one in their right mind would want. Perhaps there was tension over the for-profit direction the super-lab was heading.
He abused his sister when he was 13, and she was 4, according to her.
Probably had a major conflict of interest. I don’t know but I bet he was looking at ways to monetize AI for himself.
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