A couple of days ago, a bombshell announcement was “exploded” on the OpenAI (today the absolute leader in GenAI, which made ChatGPT, DALL-E 3 and GPT-4) board of directors.
Altman was fired from his post as CEO and will leave the board of directors. The Chairman of the Board of Directors Brockman also left his post, independent directors McCauley and Toner closed accounts in X from outsiders and went into ignorance, and D’Angelo doesn’t even answer phone calls.
Sutskever, the last (and now 1st) sixth member of the board of directors, who informed Altman about his dismissal, is now not clear where he is.
The reason for the incident officially stated in the statement is similar to “loss of trust.” There are dozens of versions of the reasons for what happened. But just perhaps, everything is quite obvious.
The revolution in OpenAI is due to a complex of reasons, the main one of which is the contradiction between the company’s non-profit mission (to create a reliable AGI that will benefit all humanity) and the commercial interests of Microsoft, which invested $10 billion in OpenAI.
Altman was the ideologist and driving force behind the deal with Microsoft and was personally responsible to the investor for his money. And Microsoft is not the kind of company to donate an inch for the benefit of all humanity.
However, OpenAI’s ownership structure is such that Microsoft owns a stake in “commercial OpenAI” and the latter is owned by “non-commercial OpenAI.” And therefore, the activities of the “commercial OpenAI” depend on the decisions of the board of directors of the “non-commercial OpenAI”
In removing Altman, the board of directors of the “non-profit OpenAI” wrote in a statement:
“OpenAI was intentionally created to achieve our mission: to ensure that general artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity. The Council remains fully committed to achieving this mission. We are grateful to Sam for his great contribution to the creation and development of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is needed to move forward. Microsoft’s commercial interests may be at risk.”
Who is behind OpenAI’s decision to ditch Microsoft and diversify into a breed with a “doing good for humanity” purpose?
And here, everything could be quite obvious. The answer to this question was formulated in an article published 4 days before the OpenAI coup – “The six-member OpenAI Board of Directors will decide “when we achieve AGI.”
With links to sources, it says that D’Angelo, McCauley and Toner – the 3 members of the board of directors of the “non-profit OpenAI” and Leike – the OpenAI head of the “super alignment team” are associated with the Effective Altruism community. These are the “new Masons” who strive to “do good better.” The purpose of the community “is to find the best ways to help others and put them into practice.”
Conceived in the ancient colleges of Oxford University and funded by the Silicon Valley elite, “effective altruists” are increasingly influential in how the UK government (and beyond) approaches AI. “Effective altruists” argue that superintelligent AI could one day destroy humanity, and that unless super-effort is made, humanity will be doomed (for “Natural selection favors AI over humans“).
The result is this version of a revolution at OpenAI:
In the face of existential risk, all the “masons” (supporters of “effective altruists”) joined forces in OpenAI to wriggle out from under the commercial interests of the “chekists” (Microsoft) and, for the latter’s money, save humanity from destruction. AI
On the other hand, Microsoft’s association with the “Chekists” is questionable and back in the 70s, the real “Chekists” invented a universal AGI antidote. We are talking about a “Perimeter” system, which is called the “Dead Hand”, a very clever and purely artificial intelligence which has been perfected for more than half a century “without noise and dust”.
Also, Sam Altman himself said that all their “amazing achievements” are on the servers of Microsoft, a long-time partner of the US intelligence services. Thus, you will not be able to cheat Microsoft. Whoever pays for electricity also owns a house with all its shallow soft furnishings.
As we know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions so only time will tell whether a final and extreme battle has just begun for the artificial general intelligence’s philosopher’s stone.
