This Thanksgiving I'll be thankful that I won't have to care (even slightly) about who is running OpenAI. The saga is over (until it isn't). Sam Altman is back as OpenAI CEO.
You really can't make this up. But you can question who is driving a technology as important as generative AI. For now, any enterprise customer of OpenAI can stop wondering if the company and its APIs will exist.
On X, Altman said (punctuation his):
i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together. when i decided to join msft on sun evening, it was clear that was the best path for me and the team. with the new board and w satya’s support, i’m looking forward to returning to openai, and building on our strong partnership with msft.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said:
We are encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance. Sam, Greg, and I have talked and agreed they have a key role to play along with the OAI leadership team in ensuring OAI continues to thrive and build on its mission. We look forward to building on our strong partnership and delivering the value of this next generation of AI to our customers and partners.
We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.
For a recap.
- Friday afternoon, OpenAI's board fired Altman.
- Employees started to rebel.
- Microsoft hired Altman and OpenAI President Greg Brockman to lead a new AI research unit, said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
- OpenAI employees were being poached. Hell, even the person that led Altman's ouster proceedings had second thoughts.
- Then talks began to bring Altman back because it was clear that OpenAI was valued at zero. Maybe Altman's saga is like the Steve Jobs return to Apple on fast forward.
- Now Altman is CEO again with a new OpenAI board.
- Apparently, all of these parties will stay off of X for Thanksgiving.
On Black Friday, we'll start questioning why ChatGPT was owned by what appears to be a middle school (a highly valued one). On Monday, every CIO that bet on OpenAI will be asked about backup plans and why she bet on one LLM vendor. The answer (probably not laid out as directly): Because the board demanded something generative AI without any thought about governance so I went for speed.
Earlier, I questioned whether we had too many large language models to choose from. We'll still have too many, but choice will matter more than ever. Don't put all of your LLMs in one basket. In fact, grab an open source model, add your proprietary data to it and make it your own. At least you won't have to worry about your model being fired by a non-profit board.
To that end, Anthropic launched its latest model, Claude 2.1. You may want to check it out as it could be a good holding in your LLM portfolio. Or better yet, screw the models and ponder the abstraction layer so you can hot swap LLMs.
