Why Sam Altman getting fired is “huge” for the AI industry

Sam alen pushed out of open AI he’s now being named the new head of Microsoft’s AI team it comes just 48 hours after that dramatic upset a chief executive of Microsoft says Alman will join the company to lead a new Advanced research team he’s 38 years old he helped to

Launch Open AI back number of years ago and in November of last year it just exploded when they released a popular platform known as chat GPT but he was dismissed from the startup on Friday after the company said it had lost confidence in him all right to help make

Sense of what’s going on here let’s bring in Tech analyst car me Levy car me good to see you happy Monday happy Monday Todd great to be here how big of a deal is this this is huge I mean open AI is the pi Piper of the AI industry at

This early stage of its Evolution so to have this kind of tumultuous change in leadership the back and forth the controversy the you know the Apparently boneheaded move to even make this happen in the first place uh really is a major shakeup for one of the key players uh in

AI of course open AI is uh the company as you said that popularized artificial intelligence moved it from the lab into uh your and my browsers uh with the release last year of chat GPT uh and frankly right now worth 80 billion Microsoft has invested 13 billion dollars over the last year has

Essentially bet the future of that company on it so you cannot underscore just how important this singular company is to the future of AI and to have this kind of chaos at the very Apex of its leadership structure is uh shocking I’m I’m suffering Whiplash at this point

Yeah we’re trying to sort of decipher the palace Intrigue if I can use that term here Cary to figure out why they dumped this guy any sense of of what was going on here yeah there there seems to have been and of course no one at open

AI is going to admit this at this point but there was growing tension between Mr Altman and the board of open AI Mr Alman has long been uh what what we’d like to call an AI accelerationist he’s very uh optimistic about the future of artificial intelligence the potential

Uses of it the game-changing nature of this technology certainly he recognizes the risks he’s spoken about it in front of elected officials um he has issued those warnings but by and large he’s really he wants to push the pedal to the medal and he was at a a developers

Conference just last week where he announced that he wanted to move some of the chat GPT tools into the public domain uh make them open source hand them over to developers allow them to develop their own versions of chat GPT apparently uh the board at open AI which

Are some we call them you know their doomsayers they’re very concerned about the potential for misuse uh they were made very nervous by this and they essentially saw him as uncontrollable and that’s what seems to have touched off their decision to show him the exit well the other twist is open AI fires

Him Microsoft quickly hires him and as you pointed out Microsoft has an interest in open AI so how does that work uh well you know Microsoft of course having invested $1 13 billion in this company they’re the largest single investor they’ve got the most to lose if their biggest AI partner uh suddenly

Crumbles in chaos and so uh they watch this with concern interesting to note that the board at openai did not advise Microsoft in advance uh that this was coming uh just just before they didn’t even give Microsoft or their CEO Sachin Nella a chance uh to absorb it or respond and so they

Botched this and so Microsoft was left in the Lurch uh was apparently not happy about this I wouldn’t be certainly uh and what they’ve done here is damage control and frankly a masterful job of damage control rather than leaving it to uh open AI to clean up its own mess

They’ve brought Sam Altman in house uh and that basically now he forms the nucleus of what will be Microsoft’s AI team going forward and so Sam Alman uh it’s not developers have no loyalty toward the company they have loyalty toward Mr Altman already 500 of them

Have signed a letter to open ai’s board either the board resigns or they’re going to work with Alman at Microsoft this is a Microsoft has essentially positioned itself to lead artificial intelligence into the future so is this a big mistake for open AI to get rid of

Sam Albin it’s one of the biggest mistaken firings in Silicone Valley history uh and uh more heads will be falling in the days to come because the board essentially should be hanging their heads in shame Tech analyst Cary Levy with his take this big shake up in the world of artificial intelligence

Thanks car me

Technology analyst Carmi Levy reacts to the firing of Sam Altman by OpenAI and explains why it’s such a seismic shift for the industry.

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