On November 17 Sam Altman was fired as CEO of OpenAI, arguably the most prominent privately held tech company, famed for pioneering ChatGPT and sparking the current AI boom, as well as fears of “risk of extinction” from the technology.
Altman was sacked—briefly—for a lack of “consistent candor” with his nonprofit board. One might wonder how a company could suddenly oust Silicon Valley’s most beloved son, and it’s largely thanks to OpenAI’s convoluted, multitiered corporate structure. A nonprofit entity fully owns its subordinate for-profit entity, which sells ChatGPT—the same subordinate that Microsoft invested $10 billion into in January. This nonprofit structure exists—or existed, as you’ll find out—to focus on building an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that “benefits humanity”—a noble goal, and one that theoretically protected the company from the influence of the tech industry’s growth-at-all-costs “Rot Economy.” The board was at the time made up of Altman, the company’s then president Greg Brockman, its chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, AI safety researcher Helen Toner, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo and Tasha McCauley, a robotics engineer who was one of the board members with deep ties to the “effective altruism” movement, which fears an AGI could destroy humanity.
The Vichy France–rivaling collapse of this board and its intended nonprofit firewall, all unable to withstand the unfettered force of raw money power, revealed in the Altman saga where the AI revolution is headed—and it’s wherever the most rich and powerful people in tech want it to go.
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