Sam Altman and OpenAI. What went wrong?

Patrick Boyle On Finance

Patrick Boyle

Investing, Business

4.9 • 320 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2023

⏱️ 19 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Send us a textFired CEO Sam Altman will return to run OpenAI - the company he co-founded, following days of speculation and turmoil at the leading generative artificial intelligence start-up.In a dramatic reversal, Altman, who was fired by OpenAI’s board of directors last week, will be reinstated under the supervision of a new board.Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president who quit the company on Friday after Altman was fired, will return alongside him. Under an “agreement in principl...

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome. You are listening to Patrick Boyle on Finance, a podcast exploring ideas from quantitative finance, examining events occurring in markets right now and financial history to see what lessons can be taken away, including interviews with some of the most interesting people in the world of finance. To learn more about the podcast, visit onfinance.org.
0:27.3	Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, told the Wall Street Journal last year that AI means that a lot of
0:35.0	people are going to lose their jobs. So he was probably not awfully
0:39.3	surprised to lose his job as the CEO of Open AI last week. There was probably no one better
0:45.9	prepared for such an outcome. I imagine that he kept his personal items in a little box
0:51.5	next to his desk at work so that nothing would be accidentally left
0:55.8	behind in the office when he eventually got the call from HR and that he immediately fled
1:01.8	to his bunker in New Zealand, probably expecting all of the other Silicon Valley CEOs to be
1:08.4	waiting there to greet him. It turns out that all of the drama at Open
1:13.5	AI was a storm in a teapot. Yesterday morning we learned that in a dramatic reversal, Altman will be
1:20.8	reinstated under the supervision of a new board that contains only one member from the prior board,
1:27.2	and Open AI's largest investor,
1:30.0	Microsoft, is expected to have a larger voice in Open AI's governance going forward.
1:36.7	A lot of the goings-on at Open AI relate to its strange corporate structure, which relate
1:43.0	to how it was initially funded.
1:45.8	There are lessons that can be drawn from the chaos at Open AI that apply to the recent trends
1:51.6	we've seen towards stakeholder capitalism. Open AI was founded in 2015 by a group of high-profile
2:00.0	entrepreneurs and researchers.
2:02.6	Among them were Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Amazon Web Services,
2:09.6	and a few others. Its stated mission was to advance artificial intelligence in a way that would benefit society as a whole, unconstraint by a need
2:20.3	to generate a financial return. They announced that they would freely collaborate with other
2:26.3	institutions and researchers by making their patents and research open to the public. The founders
	...

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