A Chaotic Week at OpenAI
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It’s been an unbelievable few days for OpenAI, the influential company behind products such as ChatGPT, the image-generating DALL-E, and GPT-4. On Friday, its CEO, Sam Altman, was suddenly fired by the company’s board. Chaos immediately followed: A majority of the company’s workers revolted, negotiations were held, and now a new agreement has been reached to return Altman to his throne.
It’s a tale of corporate mutiny fit for streaming, and we’ve been following it closely at The Atlantic. The turmoil at OpenAI is juicy, yes, but it is not just gossip: Whatever happens here will be of major consequence to the future of AI development. This is a company that has been at odds with itself over the possibility that an all-powerful “artificial general intelligence” might emerge from its research, potentially dooming humanity if it’s not carefully aligned with society’s best interests. Even though Altman has returned, the OpenAI shake-up will likely change how the technology is developed from here, with significant outcomes for you, me, and everyone else.
Yesterday, our staff writer Ross Andersen reflected on time spent with Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist and the man who struck out against Altman last week. The relationship—and the rift—between these two men encapsulates the complex dynamic within OpenAI overall. Whatever agreement has been reached on paper to return Altman to his post, the fundamental tension between AI’s promise and peril will persist. In many ways, the story is just beginning.
— Damon Beres, senior editor
OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Made a Tragic Miscalculation
By Ross Andersen
Ilya Sutskever, bless his heart. Until recently, to the extent that Sutskever was known at all, it was as a brilliant artificial-intelligence researcher. He was the star student who helped Geoffrey Hinton, one of the “godfathers of AI,” kick off the so-called deep-learning revolution. In 2015, after a short stint at Google, Sutskever co-founded OpenAI and eventually became its chief scientist; so important was he to the company’s success that Elon Musk has taken credit for recruiting him. (Sam Altman once showed me emails between himself and Sutskever suggesting otherwise.) Still, apart from niche podcast appearances and the obligatory hour-plus back-and-forth with Lex Fridman, Sutskever didn’t have much of a public profile before this past weekend. Not like Altman, who has, over the past year, become the global face of AI.
On Thursday night, Sutskever set an extraordinary sequence of events into motion. According to a post on X (formerly Twitter) by Greg Brockman, the former president of OpenAI and the former chair of its board, Sutskever texted Altman that night and asked if the two could talk the following day. Altman logged on to a Google Meet at the appointed time on Friday and quickly learned that he’d been ambushed. Sutskever took on the role of Brutus, informing Altman that he was being fired. Half an hour later, Altman’s ouster was announced in terms so vague that for a few hours, anything from a sex scandal to a massive embezzlement scheme seemed possible.
What to Read Next
The events of the past few days are just one piece of the OpenAI saga. Over the past year, the company has struggled to balance an imperative from Altman to swiftly move products into the public’s hands with a concern that the technology was not being appropriately subject to safety assessments. The Atlantic told that story on Sunday, incorporating interviews with 10 current and former OpenAI employees.
- Inside the chaos at OpenAI: This tumultuous weekend showed just how few people have a say in the progression of what might be the most consequential technology of our age, Charlie Warzel and Karen Hao write.
- The money always wins: As is always true in Silicon Valley, a great idea can get you only so far, Charlie writes.
- Does Sam Altman know what he’s creating?: Altman doesn’t know how powerful AI will become, or what its ascendance will mean for the average person, or whether it will put humanity at risk, Ross Andersen writes in his profile of the CEO from our September issue.
P.S.
Looking for a book to read over the long weekend? Try Your Face Belongs to Us, by Kashmir Hill, about the secretive facial-recognition start-up dismantling the concept of privacy. Jesse Barron has a review in The Atlantic here.
— Damon