Earthquake in the artificial intelligence sector: the sector’s most prominent boss, Sam Altman of OpenAI, has been dismissed. The announcement was made this Friday, November 17 through a concise statement of the board of directors announcing his departure with immediate effect. “Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board which concluded that he had not always been candid in his communications with the board, hindering his ability to fulfill his responsibilities.” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer, will serve as interim CEO until a permanent successor is designated.
After a first message succinct on the social network second stating that the day of the announcement had been a “strange experience in many ways”. In its press release, OpenAI also announced that its co-founder Greg Brockman would no longer serve as chairman of the board of directors but would retain his position in the company. Greg Brockman, however, revealed on Twitter that he was resigning from the company. “Sam and I are shocked and saddened by the board’s decisions.”
A change of reign which questions in many respects. Firstly because of its speed. According to the newsletter creator Command Line of The VergeMicrosoft, an essential partner of OpenAI – it has invested more than 10 billion dollars in it – was only informed of the news shortly before it was made public.
The tone of OpenAI’s press release, more offensive than usual in this type of situation, is also surprising. Is it Sam Altman’s management style that created divergences, his parallel projects at OpenAI (Worldcoin, Humane, etc.) or a problem with the technologies developed by the group? The lucrative shift taken by OpenAI in recent years also seems to have created an internal split. Initially, the entity was a non-profit organization, an AI research laboratory wanting to develop this technology while protecting humanity against the misuse that could be made of it. But in 2019, it made a major turning point, creating a for-profit subsidiary which will experience meteoric growth. A change in mentality which necessarily modifies the nature of the developments carried out, the speed of their launches and the security measures planned to support them.
Will OpenAI now change its course? Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in any case clarified on X that the group remained “committed to their partnership [avec OpenAI]and towards Mira and the team”. According to the analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, “Amazon and Google could try to take advantage of Friday’s storm at OpenAI to better position themselves in the AI race. Many things will be reconfigured but Microsoft and Nadella will undoubtedly take more control in the strategic directions of OpenAI in this pivotal period”.
The evolution of OpenAI will have a major impact on the sector. Even if the company is now far from being the only one engaged in the great AI race. Many players have in fact emerged since the launch, a year ago, of the famous ChatGPT, such as Inflexion or Anthropic, founded by two former OpenAI employees and supported by the giant Amazon.
The sharing of discoveries practiced by the community open source of AI, with players such as Hugging Face, has also started an excellent dynamic. “Before March, only a few companies had any traction in the generative AI space. In April, a lot of information about Meta’s Large Language Model (LLM) leaked. Since then, Meta has released its own even other elements. This leak generated a great wave of developments open source. […] And many of these new players are making astonishing progress,” Mitchell Baker, president of the Mozilla Foundation, explained to L’Express.
France is also throwing all its forces into the battle, with players such as Mistral AI. The day Sam Altman learned of his sidelining, Xavier Niel (Iliad), Rodolphe Saadé (CMA-CGM) and Eric Schmidt (former boss of Google) revealed their alliance to launch a laboratory of excellence in AI equipped with 300 millions of euros. To the list of OpenAI’s competitors, a new organization led by Sam Altman may also be added in the future. The former boss of OpenAI is already the majority shareholder of the company Humane, focused on the development of devices designed for AI and which recently unveiled a new high-tech “pin” allowing interaction with an intelligence artificial.