The decision by OpenAI’s board of directors to sacrifice OpenAI’s founder and chief executive officer Sam Altman as CEO only to reinstate him four days later, speaks volumes about how the people that govern the rapidly evolving field of generative AI prioritise commercial success over humanitarian morals. The reasoning of Altman’s firing was reported to be that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications” and that the board “no longer had confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI”. Following Altman’s ousting, hundreds of OpenAI employees, including co-founder and board member Ilya Sutskever, signed a letter demanding that remaining board members resign or they would leave.
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According to The Economist, there was speculation that Altman was moving too quickly to expand OpenAI’s commercial offerings without adequately considering the safety implications. However, Altman has previously expressed concern for OpenAI’s safety stating “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong and we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the goverment to prevent that from happening and we try to be very clear-eyed about what the down-side case is and the work we have to do to mitigate that”.
Silicon Valley is undergoing a major transformation
Altman’s initial firing is part of a bigger shake-up between two groups of people in Silicon Valley. The “Doomers” which prefer open-sourced software and calls on AI regulation as opposed the “Boomers” who are comprised of technology optimists and opt for closed-sourced or propriety software. The afrementioned AI regulations are based on safety but would also make it harder for new companies to break into the industry and therefore protect the investments of “Doomers”. Sam Altman was able, as the human face for generative AI since the release ChatGPT in the year 2022 and still today, to bridge the gap between these two groups of people.
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Win-Win Scenario at Microsoft
Microsoft can help. After Sam Altman’s initial firing, the softwear visionary was initially welcomed into microsoft along with the employees who had threatened to leave following his ousting. Microsoft, who owns 49 percent in OpenAI, has invested USD 10 billion since 2019 into OpenAI. If Altman had joined Microsoft as initially expected, Microsoft would also have retained their licensing rights with OpenAI, along with their relationship with Altman, and a number of researchers and engineers leading a new advanced AI team. Microsoft still hopes for changes in governance that would allow it to have a voice on how the company is managed. This is according to The Financial Times.
The Future of Governance
The intial conceptualisation of Open AI was to create a non-profit artificial intelligence set-up that would design open source software and attempt to counter Google’s growing dominance in the field. OpenAI will continue to release AI technology at a rapid pace. Investors and government will be looking closely at the governance systems set up by these firms because of their rapid growth over the past few years. According to the Financial Times, analysts have suggested that OpenAI will be hit by the week’s events, with rival groups Google and Amazon representing strong and stable challengers in the race to offer generative artificial intelligence services to businesses and consumers. Altman will have to oversee the complex governance arrangements where a non-profit board oversees an for-profit corporation and create a path to a simplified corporate structure going forward.
What About the Rest of Us?
The right to AI’s control and goverance will arguably have the biggest impact on the public. As an example, AI-influenced autonomous weaponry. Consider the current war between Russia, Ukraine, or Israel-Palestine as an example. The autonomous weapons are programmed to hit a specific target. AI searches for that “target profile” using sensor data like facial recognition. When the algorithm detects that a target (or person) matches the profile of the weapon, the weapon fires and kills. This could be a major security concern as it does not involve human judgement, and the weapons are no longer accountable to the users.
Outside of war, we are only starting to see regulation regarding the use of deepfakes and the misinformation and malicious content that comes alongside it. Financial penalties are still a far cry from preventing its potential manipulate public opinion alongside more nuainced issues like financial fraud and revenge porn. However, there is yet to be a federal criminal law or legislation against deepfakes in the United States.
Perhaps the select few in control should go back to the board’s purpose of creating AI that “benefits all of humanity” over its desire for profit and the battle for AI dominance.
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