21/11/2023
Hey DETHIE,
OK, This is actually BIG news, and drama, and insane...
This could, not joking, alter the course of humanity.
The CEO of OpenAI (the maker of ChatGPT) Sam Altman got fired on Friday.
The board of directors decided he had not been "entirely candid" with them.
Which sounds like a code word for "we want to slow him down and he doesn't want to slow down."
They then put in an interim CEO over the weekend.... The CTO Mira Murati.
And then replaced her with ANOTHER new CEO today.
The new CEO of OpenAI is....Emmett Shear, the former CEO of Twitch.
The only problem is...
Emmett Shear says he is going to slow down the pace of development from a 10 to a... 1 or 2?
What you need to understand is this is fundamentally a battle between accelerationists and decelerationists.
It's a battle between technological optimists, who think progress is the key to future prosperity, and doomerists, who think AI will end the world.
But the decelerationists can't win. Sure, they can kill OpenAI. But they can't stop progress.
See... Sam Altman didn't just get fired, he's taking a HUGE chunk of the OpenAi workforce with him.
His co-founder and the president Greg Brockman has already left.
So have hoards of others. Let me rephrase that. By some accounts, OVER 500 people have already committed to leaving OpenAI for Microsoft.
Many of the top executives at the company, including the interim CEO and members of the board, have signed a letter requesting that the board resign and bring back Sam and the rest of the team.
But guess what? Microsoft already scooped them up to start a new research division.
To summarize:
1. OpenAI's board FIRED Sam Altman and replaced him with Emmett Shear, who will slow down the pace of AI development to 1/10th of what it is now
2. Greg Brockman, the president and Co-founder of OpenAI has also left, along with dozens of other high level roles at the company. Reportedly, more than 500 others have signed a letter stating the board must step down or they will leave
3. Microsoft hired Sam, Greg and others to run their new Ai research division, which is likely to become the winner in the Ai race. With that level of talent, resources and hardware at their disposal, it will be hard not to
Perhaps worst of all, the board admitted that this may "destroy OpenAI, which would not be against the mission"
What this means is its likely that some emergent technology was seen by Sam and the board.
The board got scared and wanted to shut it down while Sam didn't.
AGI aka artificial general intelligence may be here and we don't even know it yet.
This will be written about in history books and might make Microsoft the world leader in AI.