The fallout over the firing of the co-founder of OpenAI continued this week, raising concerns that the uncertain future of the company could more broadly affect the future of generative AI (genAI) technology.
Hundreds of OpenAI employees — nearly the company’s entire staff — signed a letter Monday threatening to quit and go work for Microsoft unless everyone on OpenAI’s board of directors resigns and reappoints co-founder Sam Altman as CEO, according to a memo circulated on social media.
“Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI,” the employees wrote. “We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment, and care for our mission and employees. Microsoft has assured us that there are positions for all OpenAI employees.”
Those jobs would be with Microsoft’s new advanced AI lab now being led by Altman and Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s former president and board member who resigned over Altman’s firing.
If OpenAI were to implode over the internal shakeup, which has still not been fully explained, industry experts said it would not markedly affect AI development. “The cat’s out of the bag, people know what these models can do and the recipes for doing it,” said Braden Hancock, head of technology and co-founder of Snorkel AI, a startup that helps companies develop large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific use.
“Open AI nailed the product marketing and delivery, but the core technology is being pursued simultaneously by at least a dozen well-funded and well-staffed major tech companies, not to mention research labs and hundreds of AI startups,” Hancock said. “They had a first-mover advantage, but generative AI is here to stay, regardless of who’s at the front of the marathon at any point in time.”
For companies now deploying or considering genAI platforms, Hancock’s advice is to build their AI strategies responsibly, which would include not overly relying on any single provider. “Just as being multi-cloud has been an essential part of risk management for enterprises for years, being multi-LLM moving forward should be as well,” he said.
The AI universe is a wild west show right now, according to Jack Gold, principal analyst with J. Gold Associates. And with the OpenAI leadership change, it just got wilder.
“You have the two creators, driving founders and leading forces of OpenAI now being hired by Microsoft, which today is an investor,” Gold said. “But in the future, Microsoft will become a direct competitor. Having them run the advanced AI lab at Microsoft gives them the ability to re-create and surpass what OpenAI has done. Microsoft has a massive amount of resources it can apply.”
OpenAI’s board consists of four members (in addition to Brockman), including Adam D’Angelo, the current CEO of Quora; Tasha McCauley, an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation; Helen Toner, director of strategy…
2023-11-25 18:41:02
Original from www.computerworld.com rnrn