AI Intelligence Briefing: No Content Without Context

OPEN AI Winners and Losers

Winners

Sam Altman

So Sam Altman has his Steve Jobs moment, only he wraps it up in 5 days flat.

Coming out of it, he has a stronger relationship with Microsoft, a revamped board, and overwhelming support from staff and investors. Big win for him.

Satya Nadella

In all the turmoil, Satya was the adult in the room. And instead of using his leverage to extract something from Altman, he created a safe space in real time, giving him the leverage he needed to work out a return.

And he did it all this just hours before the markets opened on Monday. In doing so he secured Microsoft’s partnership / investment and paved a way for a bigger voice in Open AI’s governance.

Twitter

Prior to last Friday, all Twitter/X news focused on inappropriate comments from Elon and the free rein of Nazi’s on the app. Once the Open Ai saga started, Twitter became the go-to source for first person reports from the players in this drama. It showed Twitter’s value in rapidly evolving situations.

Microsoft

Microsoft gets blindsided by everybody else by the Open AI coup attempt and over the last weekend, and many people were speculating that the stock would take a big hit. Instead, Microsoft positions itself to win regardless of what Open AI does, achieves a five year stock high and takes a commanding position in the AI arms race.

Open AI staff

Open AI staff collectively flexed its power by acting quickly and almost unamimously presenting an ultimatum to the Open AI board: resign and bring back Sam Altman or we walk to Microsoft. Having a letter that included over 700 out of 770 employees (including board member Ilya Sutskever and former CTO and briefly-interim CEO Mira Murati) exerted tremendous pressure on the board to rectify their rash move.

Interim CEO Emmitt Shear

Emmitt Shear queried the board as to what Sam Altman did that warranted his firing and when he found out there was no malfeaseance on his part, he told the board that he would not stay on as CEO. More importantly, he jumped in the role of arbitrator and brokered the peace that ended this strange saga before Thanksgiving.

Losers

AI Safety

The unconventional corporate structure board composition and governance of Open AI was created specifically to make sure safety adviocates would have a voice at the table. Now that voice may no longer be there. And as long as Open AI is the industry leader, what they do affects every other player. This week (lost in the Open AI news), Meta announced that it is disbanding its Responsible AI team. In the effort to catch up with Open AI, competitors such as Google, Meta, Inflection and X AI may pay less attention to safety issues

Google, Meta, Anthropic, NVIDIA et al

A lot of companies were salivating and openly courting Open AI personnel to join them. There was a perceived opening to poach some of the brightest minds in AI and take advantage of Open AI’s turmoil to close the gap between then. Instead, Open AI has come out of this with more stability and momentum and theya re still releasing new product features to GPT 4.

Ilya Sutskever

At one point, it was believed that Sutskever was the key instigator and he certainly was the one making all the initial calls to Sam Altman, Greg Brockman and Mira Murati. But his change of heart probably did much to bring the situation back to a possible resolution. He was removed from the board but as far as we know, he still retains his role as Chief Scientist.

Helen Toner

While we still don’t know which board members led the coup, Helen Toner was removed from the board in the restructuring and is considered to have had differing opionions with Sam Altman on safety issues. To date, she has not publicly made a statement, except for a brief tweet after it was all over: “And now, we all get some sleep”.

Happy Thanksgiving to All!