There’s something very human, though hardly reassuring, about the fact that the best minds entrusted with being the custodians of developing likely world-altering technology — artificial general intelligence — can be so clouded by personality politics.
It's one thing for the OpenAI board to have misjudged the reaction of its core stakeholders to the firing of its chief executive and co-founder Sam Altman. It’s another to have backtracked so violently — Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist and board member widely seen as a key instigator of the ousting expressed his regret — when things didn’t go to plan, significantly eroding claims of malfeasance by Altman and that the board’s actions were about prioritising responsibility and caution over unbridled technological advancement and profits.
The situation at OpenAI remains fluid. At the time of writing, the vast majority of staff have threatened to follow Altman’s defection to Microsoft unless the current board resigns. Investors are up in arms and countenancing legal action. And its customers are already mulling alternatives.
There are plenty of imponderables, including OpenAI’s swift conversion from a non-profit to for-profit, and whether the resultant awkward board structure provides effective oversight — and investor control — while there’s a very commercial imperative to stay ahead of the competition and generate enough funds to continue to pay for the processing power to innovate. There’s also the increasingly outsized influence that charismatic individuals, from Altman to Elon Musk and Sam Bankman-Fried, tend to play in shaping critical fields of technology, and not necessarily always with good outcomes.
