The OpenAI debacle (a retrospective)

Daniel & Chris conduct a retrospective analysis of the recent OpenAI debacle in which CEO Sam Altman was sacked by the OpenAI board, only to return days later with a new supportive board. The events and people involved are discussed from start to finish along with the potential impact of these events on the AI industry. Sponsors: Traceroute https://deploy.equinix.com/traceroute/ – Listen and follow Season 3 of Traceroute starting November 2 on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts! Fastly https://fastly.com/?utm_source=changelog – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com https://www.fastly.com/?utm_source=changelog&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=changelog-sponsorshipFly.io https://fly.io/changelog – The home of Changelog.com — Deploy your apps and databases close to your users. In minutes you can run your Ruby, Go, Node, Deno, Python, or Elixir app (and databases!) all over the world. No ops required. Learn more at fly.io/changelog https://fly.io/changelog and check out the speedrun in their docs https://fly.io/docs/speedrun/. Featuring: Chris Benson – Website https://chrisbenson.com, GitHub https://github.com/chrisbenson, LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrisbenson, X https://x.com/chrisbensonDaniel Whitenack – Website https://www.datadan.io/, GitHub https://github.com/dwhitena, X https://x.com/dwhitenaShow Notes: OpenAI | Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenAIHow OpenAI’s origins explain the Sam Altman drama https://www.npr.org/2023/11/24/1215015362/chatgpt-openai-sam-altman-fired-explainedOpenAI chaos: A timeline of firings, interim CEOs, re-hirings and other twists https://www.axios.com/2023/11/22/openai-microsoft-sam-altman-ceo-chaos-timelineOpenAI researchers warned board of AI breakthrough ahead of CEO ouster, sources say https://www.reuters.com/technology/sam-altmans-ouster-openai-was-precipitated-by-letter-board-about-ai-breakthrough-2023-11-22Everyone’s talking about OpenAI’s Q*. Here’s what you need to know about the mysterious project. https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-project-q-sam-altman-ia-model-explainer-2023-11It is Time to Profit off of the OpenAI Drama https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/it-is-time-to-profit-off-of-the-openai-drama?time=1701022166Yann LeCun | LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/posts/yann-lecun_please-ignore-the-deluge-of-complete-nonsense-activity-7133900073117061121-tTmGAdvent of GenAI Hackathon https://adventofgenai.comUpcoming Events: Register for upcoming webinars here https://practicalai.fm/webinars!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Speaker 00

  Welcome to Practical AI. If you work with artificial intelligence, aspire to, or are curious how AI-related technologies are changing the world, this is the show for you. Thank you to our partners for helping us bring you Practical AI each and every week. Fasi.com, fly.io, and typesense.org.

• 0:39Speaker 01

  What's up, friends? AI continues to be integrated into every facet of our lives, and that remains true because you can now index your database with AI, you can write more code, become that 10x you always wanted to be, and you can even draft a letter for a lease on an apartment or a new property. AI is everywhere. And it might be time for us to start questioning, is AI our friend or our worst enemy? And that's the focus of the three-part season opener of the Aubrey podcast called Tracert Podcast. You can listen and follow the new season of Tracert starting November 2nd on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And this show is all about the humanity and the hardware that shapes our digital world. In every episode of Tracert, a team of technologists seeks to untangle the complex question, who

• 1:24Speaker 01

  shapes the internet? Seasons one and two gave us a crucial understanding of the inner workings of technology while revealing the human element behind tech. And season three tackles not just AI questions, but also, how can we use technology to preserve the Earth? Who influences the technology that gets made? And what happened to the flying cars we were promised? I think it's safe to say that the future of AI is both exciting and terrifying, so it's interesting to hear the perspectives of experts in the field. Listen and follow this new season of Tracert starting November 2nd on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 2:22Daniel Whitenack?

  Well, welcome to another fully connected episode of the Practical AI Podcast. My name is Daniel Whiteknecht. I am the founder and CEO at Prediction Guard and I'm joined as always by my co-host, Chris Benson, who is a tech strategist at Lockheed Martin. How you doing, Chris?

• 2:38Chris Benson?

  Doing very well today, Daniel. It has been quite a past week or so.

• 2:42Daniel Whitenack?

  It has been quite a week. We've had a couple. Well, in the US, we've had, usually, people take off a couple of holiday days for Thanksgiving, but even leading up to that and during that, there was, you know, all of the craziness of, I think, what will be remembered as a very unique Thanksgiving season in the AI world, at least.

• 3:07Chris Benson?

  Yes, it's been a soap opera, to say the least.

• 3:09Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah. I was trying to think up a good pun from a soap opera title, Days of Our Lives or something, but I couldn't, I couldn't think up one for OpenAI, Days of Our Artificial Lives, or I don't know what it would be.

• 3:23Chris Benson?

  I don't know. It's just, but it's definitely, I mean, not even day by day, but like, at some points, you know, hours by hours, radical changes along the way.

• 3:34Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes.

• 3:34Chris Benson?

  So it's, and of course, we're talking about the saga of OpenAI and all that happened, which is what we're going to talk about today.

• 3:43Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's what we have to talk about. And I think, rather than just us giving a few hot takes, which I hope that we will have, I think it would be good to kind of step back and kind of look at the history of OpenAI, how it came about, and the progression of OpenAI as an entity and their offerings, which kind of frames up some of, I think, the drama that we've seen over the past week, the week of Thanksgiving, November 2023. You know, it's interesting, Chris, I was looking back, we had Wojciech Czeremba from OpenAI.

• 4:23Chris Benson?

  One of the founders.

• 4:24Daniel Whitenack?

  Early on. Yeah, yeah. One of the founders. And that was episode 14 of this podcast. We're now on. About 250, I think.

• 4:34Chris Benson?

  Somewhere in there.

• 4:35Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, it seems like from those early stages till now, we've been kind of going on our own journey in parallel with OpenAI as they've had this amazing journey as a company or as an organization. And way back then, when we were talking to Wochek, we were talking about really reinforcement learning and robots. I don't know if you remember at that time, they were doing these like robotic arms and they would have like stuffed giraffes and they would hit the robotic arms with the stuffed giraffes, which is kind of comical, but it was like a perturbation. They're trying to create kind of robust reinforcement learning to control robotics. And that was kind of, I

• 5:17Daniel Whitenack?

  need to look back at the episode. I think that was basically what we had talked about back then. That's, that was kind of the focus.

• 5:23Chris Benson?

  I remember being very interested in that episode and he is such a smart person, holy cow, because I had been leading up the first AI team at Honeywell at the time and we were doing also robotic arm work within Honeywell's business using convolutional nets to see. It was early days compared to what we're doing these days, but

• 5:42Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah.

• 5:43Chris Benson?

  holy cow, those got, he was so smart on that. That was one of those episodes that's really hung with me over the years.

• 5:49Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. And kind of stepping back and taking a wider view of OpenAI as a whole. I'm even looking at the transcript of that episode now. And at this time would have been, I guess, four or more years ago, Wochek said, "The goal of OpenAI is quite ambitious. It's to figure out a way to build artificial general intelligence or artificial intelligence, or to be more exact, how to build it in a way that it's safe or that we can control it." And he says, "Let's say, figure out from a political perspective, how to deploy it in a way that's beneficial to humanity as a whole." So that's kind of one little clip from that episode. And if you look at OpenAI's founding, if we just take a look at

• 6:34Daniel Whitenack?

  How it was founded and how it progressed to this point of the chaos of last week. It was really focused uniquely on this problem of creating an organization that would steward us towards artificial general intelligence in a way that was beneficial to humanity. And there were various people involved in that, various funding groups. We mentioned Wochek, but of course, Sam Altman, who has been in the news a lot. Elon Musk, Greg Brockman and others that were part of that original group when the organization was founded in December of 2015.

• 7:14Chris Benson?

  I want to explicitly point out, it was set up as a nonprofit at that point in time.

• 7:17Daniel Whitenack?

  That's correct.

• 7:18Chris Benson?

  Which somewhat changed, as we'll talk about.

• 7:21Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, which maybe was part of the tension that led to last week.

• 7:24Chris Benson?

  Indeed.

• 7:25Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, so it kind of had this initial board. Sam Altman was part of that. Of course, he was in the news a lot this last week. Prior to OpenAI, Sam was the president of Y Combinator from 2014 until 2019. And I know that there was some things in the news, kind of trying to imply certain things about why he was let go or fired or left Y Combinator in 2019 and trying to tie those forward. I don't know that that was totally coherent for me in terms of what it was. But anyway, that's kind of his past in this startup venture backed world. I think that would be the key thing to highlight there is

• 8:04Daniel Whitenack?

  he's coming from this sort of venture backed startup world IPO, raised a bunch of rounds of funding and kind of big tech mindset, I guess.

• 8:16Chris Benson?

  Yeah, I agree with you. I think that was the very beginning, in my sense of it at least, of kind of that tension is that you, it's a very different culture from a nonprofit effort in terms of the kind of the way you run your business and such as that. So.

• 8:30Daniel Whitenack?

  You know, one kind of key other commercial player in this would be Microsoft. Who has invested at this point over $10 billion in OpenAI Global LLC. So that will be an important maybe distinction here in a minute. But Microsoft is a big player in this, which is why you might have seen Microsoft's CEO making statements during the past week, et cetera.

• 8:56Chris Benson?

  Correct. For whatever reason, you know, kind of going to that point, because that that is a structural concern of OpenAI that is by almost any account, a little bit bizarre. You know, and even this podcast is almost as old as OpenAI. We're not quite there, but we were, you know, when 2019, we were operating when all this stuff was happening and I remember it. And they've sort of created, they have the parent company, which is nonprofit. And the short of it is they have this LLC, which is a for-profit entity, which is a subsidiary of the nonprofit. But all of the, because of the way they're operating now, all of the funding, the investment, everything has gone into the LLC.

• 9:40Chris Benson?

  And yet you have this group of disconnected investors from the daily operations, operating at the nonprofit level above. So it's two entities that were never really intended to operate together in a direct legal manner, at least from an intent standpoint. And somehow the attorneys have made this all work so that it is legal.

• 10:01Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. When I was looking at like key takeaways in terms of what we're doing here, which is sort of a retrospective on this crazy week of events.

• 10:10Chris Benson?

  Yeah.

• 10:10Daniel Whitenack?

  One of the things which is not really related to OpenAI, but if you're in business, it was a key takeaway is like, don't create convoluted corporate structures.

• 10:19Chris Benson?

  No.

• 10:19Daniel Whitenack?

  It's not, not going to help anybody. So there you go. That's a non-AI tip. If, if you're in the process of structuring some complicated corporate thing, try to simplify it. But yeah, you're, you're right. The start was nonprofit and NPR even quoted this as kind of like, it's almost like.

• 10:41Daniel Whitenack?

  An anti-big tech company, that's how they quote unquote referred to this nonprofit version of OpenAI when it started, that it would prioritize principles over profit. Again, the idea with the founding of this was it would be a way for the best AI researchers in the world to help steward this really disruptive and potentially harmful technology in some respects into the future in a way that it would benefit humanity. That was kind of the framing.

• 11:16Chris Benson?

  I think that really plays into what ended up happening, which developed over the years, is that they were doing two things. They were serving that mission as they founded from 2015 on, but as we have all learned and talked about quite a lot over the years, it's very, very, very expensive

• 11:33Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes.

• 11:33Chris Benson?

  to create these large models. And so you get the sense of they were constantly fundraising and they hit this point where they needed, they needed a serious infusion of cash to push forward where they were wanting to go. And I think Microsoft comes along and says, well, we'll give you an initial billion, but that also happened at the same point where this new corporate structure evolved. And I think that that was all tied together as well as I can tell from reading many, many articles on the topic.

• 12:01Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:02Chris Benson?

  To get that investment going. And so they did that. They got the new thing. They got the initial infusion of a billion and then the year after that, they got 10 billion more from Microsoft. But by doing that, you had the driving forward on, you know, how fast can we get there and be the leader and do this? And that entire startup kind of culture contending with the, our mission says we're going to do this for humanity and we're going to do this safely. And you can see the, they're crashing together and have been the last week or so.

• 12:33Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah. So specifically what you're referring to, Chris, is this transition from a nonprofit organization to a quote unquote capped for profit, which I had no idea it even existed until

• 12:51Chris Benson?

  The 100 time cap.

• 12:53Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes, until we started talking about this a couple of years ago. But yes, a capped nonprofit where the profit would be capped at 100 times any investment, which according to the numbers that you just told me about investment would be a significant profit regardless, but a capped nonprofit. And according to OpenAI at the time, and I think what they've said, this really had to do with attracting talent and attracting investment at the levels that they would need to achieve this progress towards artificial general intelligence that would benefit humanity.

• 13:31Daniel Whitenack?

  Now, there's two kind of key pieces here. The OpenAI Inc., which is the nonprofit. So it's very confusing and maybe slightly annoying to have to refer to these differently, but OpenAI Inc., the nonprofit. And we mentioned a second ago, Microsoft investing in OpenAI Global LLC, which is the capped for profit. And what's interesting is that essentially this created a scenario where the board, which had full control of the capped for-profit

• 14:11Daniel Whitenack?

  company, as a nonprofit, couldn't have a board member that would have some sort of financial stake in the for-profit company, which all of that seems kind of convoluted, but let me say it again. So like the board that's controlling The OpenAI entities could not have members on it that would have financial stakes in the capped for-profit OpenAI Global LLC, which means that Microsoft, for example, as a huge investor in OpenAI Global LLC, did not hold a board seat on OpenAI Inc., which will play into kind of the timeline that we'll talk about here in a second of what's happened over the past couple of weeks.

• 14:56Chris Benson?

  And one other thing to throw in on that is, though I am not an attorney, I'm fairly sure that the 100 time cap was one of the mechanisms by which they could make the for-profit fit into the nonprofit, because pure for-profits, in theory, have essentially unlimited ability to generate profit. Nonprofits are not allowed to have profit, you know, you must use those expenses. And the 100 times caps, I think, was something of a bridge. So I say that from a, I did not go to law school to learn this, but I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure it's tied in there somehow.

• 15:28Daniel Whitenack?

  Well, Chris, in this saga of what's happened, we have this nonprofit, originally OpenAI Inc., that has spun out this for-profit OpenAI Global LLC, which has received a huge amount of funding from Microsoft. And as we all know, over the past couple of years, has really become the dominant force in the AI industry with releases of all sorts of amazing technology and tools, and of course, most recently, ChatGPT. So it might be worth just kind of giving people some context around this of like,

• 16:07Daniel Whitenack?

  what happened over those years with OpenAI that made it such a driving force, which eventually led to, I mean, you could have a company that has a convoluted corporate structure and it blows up and the CEO gets fired and, you know, no one hears about it in the news and our lives pretty much go on, although it's probably unfortunate for their lives. But here, this had an impact kind of on the whole AI industry. And I think will have an impact on the AI market moving forward. Because OpenAI was such a dominant force in the industry. So maybe we could go back and visit some of those milestones in the history that came along

• 16:47Daniel Whitenack?

  from those early days when we were talking about robots and stuffed giraffes to now where we've got GPTs, I guess. So back in 2016, so this would have been almost when we were starting the podcast, Nvidia gifted the first DGX1 supercomputer to OpenAI.

• 17:10Chris Benson?

  It's quite a gift of the day.

• 17:12Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, so they were kind of early on into this wave of really powerful, cutting-edge, GPU-powered supercomputers that could train larger and larger models, which is one of the things that's of course led to these very powerful foundation models that we've seen in recent years. I don't know if you've got, they haven't gifted you one and you have it in your garage or something, Chris?

• 17:37Chris Benson?

  No, my first DGX1 was, which was when that was all there was on the DGX line, the original one. I got it at Honeywell and we had it under a desk for a while because we got it and then we had to figure out how to get in the data center and stuff. But yeah, that was, I remember thinking, wow, I got it. I have an AI supercomputer under our desk here. This is amazing. Anyway, a little side story.

• 17:59Daniel Whitenack?

  And in those kind of years after that, you see what maybe I would consider, and I know it's hard to make generalizations like this because there's a lot going on at OpenAI even now. But in those early years, I think you really saw this kind of exploration phase of setting up the right tooling, setting up the right compute, letting researchers explore various things like the robotics stuff, like RL, computer vision things.

• 18:29Daniel Whitenack?

  And you saw things like the universe software platform, OpenAI GEM, which I know I've used in workshops for like reinforcement learning type of things. So you really saw this kind of wide range of exploration in those early years, leading up to February 2019, when GPT-2 was announced. And this was the first kind of, from OpenAI at least, the first major language model or foundation model, base model, that gained a lot of attention for its ability to output really human-like coherent text.

• 19:10Daniel Whitenack?

  Of course, is the first in the line, leading up to the latest GPT models that we see now, like GPT-4. But that was in February of 2019, still something that I think was basically just being looked at by people like us.

• 19:25Chris Benson?

  Yeah, we had, episode 32 of our own podcast was covering that.

• 19:29Daniel Whitenack?

  Oh, there you go, episode 32, um, GPT-2, episode 32. It's interesting, um, now, Chris, uh, when I'm helping people learn how to like, fine tune a language model or something like that, I'll often use GPT-2. And it's interesting to see because now this would be considered a very small model. And not only that, but it's open, right? So OpenAI was by its very nature and stated aims, going to be very open with its research and models and IP and all of that. So GPT-2 is on hugging face and uh, it's a great model to use even now,

• 20:12Daniel Whitenack?

  to kind of figure out how to fine tune language models. But it's just interesting to compare that to, for example, GPT-3.5 or GPT-4. I'll never see those models in terms of downloading the weights and all of that.

• 20:29Chris Benson?

  It became a different org.

• 20:31Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes. And with their own reasons for doing that, and that's their decision. But um, yeah, in 2020 then, so a year later, OpenAI announced GPT-3, which was a language model that was more extensively trained on this sort of huge corpus of content from the public internet. And you know, so it was a lot of scraped data and all of that. And I think this is really where you started to see some pretty crazy outputs from these language models, what people might have thought not possible. They started to see this with GPT-3.

• 21:13Daniel Whitenack?

  This is also where you kind of see the shift within OpenAI to, from releasing GPT-2 as a model to releasing GPT-3 as an API with a more gated release, a slower release. I was even reading in some of kind of the lead up and debriefing from the chaos of last week that you could interpret some of this slower release of GPT-3 as an API and a product to really this tension that you're seeing between a startup kind of mentality wanting to fail fast, release things fast, learn from things and in public and this

• 21:55Daniel Whitenack?

  kind of more shielded nonprofit, good of humanity side that is wanting to do things maybe in a more slow way that ensures safety and releases things not with harmful outputs, that sort of thing. So you see this kind of starting to really collide and come together, I think around GPT-3. GPT-2, GPT-3 were language models, caused a big stir in the AI world. Again, still not something that public. You know, as far as ChatGPT wasn't something that a lot of people knew about in the general public. I think even when they released DALL-E in 2021, this was kind of text to image model,

• 22:40Daniel Whitenack?

  where you could, you know, put in your prompt, the astronaut riding the horse on the moon, and you could get that. And I think the public saw that as still kind of like a novelty and that sort of thing. And that led up all the way to December 2022, of course, when AI started, when ChatGPT was released, at least in free preview.

• 23:04Chris Benson?

  Which changed the world.

• 23:06Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes.

• 23:07Chris Benson?

  When we were talking, even going back to DALL-E, people were aware that there was this thing, and they saw all these crazy AI pictures. But if you had asked someone who wasn't following this industry the way we do, most of them out there, they would have said, oh, I've seen some of those photos, but I couldn't tell you what the organization was at the time. They didn't know.

• 23:25Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes.

• 23:26Chris Benson?

  That really changed with ChatGPT. The whole world woke up to this stuff.

• 23:30Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah. And I mean, we've been talking about OpenAI on this podcast pretty much nonstop since then, and everyone else has as well. Of course, ChatGPT isn't the only thing going on in the AI world, and hopefully we're representing that on this podcast. But it is certainly a driving force. And we've, you know, mentioned it a lot. And that's why the events of last week caused so much stir. It's worth noting, still, things happen after ChatGPT, right? We had GPT-4. We had, I think what you saw is a shift in public discourse from Sam Altman and Greg Brockman at OpenAI, really related to, hey, we need to really provide recommendations

• 24:14Daniel Whitenack?

  for governance of superintelligence, governance of artificial intelligence. And

• 24:21Daniel Whitenack?

  Also at the same time rapidly releasing new products as well. So you see this again, this tension, right? Like, hey, we want to talk publicly about governance of superintelligence and regulations around this. And at the same time, we're going to have our OpenAI Dev Days and release for new offerings, which are going to blow your mind and immediately permeate all industries, right? So you've got GPT Vision and the GPTs plural, which is kind of easier ways to create customized models and systems and RAG workflows, along with other things like their

• 25:01Daniel Whitenack?

  assistants, playground and API. So you have, again, this like, you just see these two things kind of coexisting where I'll use the words of NPR, they quote, say, "two competing tribes within OpenAI adherence to the serve humanity and not stakeholders credo and those who subscribe to the more traditional Silicon Valley MO of using investor money to release consumer products into the world as rapidly as possible," end quote. So you see this even in this past year, I think, in public discourse and in the release of products. And that leads us all the way to

• 25:42Daniel Whitenack?

  November 16th. So I don't know, where were you on November 16th, Chris?

• 25:48Chris Benson?

  You know, we're talking like this great historical moment. As we're recording this, this is what Sunday afternoon, this was a week and a half ago that we're talking on a Thursday. And so the whole thing happened in that week before Thanksgiving. And it was done in one week from a Thursday, basically to a Thursday to a Thursday for all practical purposes, or Thursday to the Wednesday. And it was working and happened to look at the news and the first thing I saw was OpenAI had fired Sam and was like-

• 26:18Daniel Whitenack?

  Which was crazy because it was like right after his keynote-

• 26:21Chris Benson?

  I know, a day, it was a day later. It was a day after his keynote.

• 26:26Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah, it was just mind boggling. Yeah, so apparently he got a text on Thursday night from one of the co-founders asking him to join a Google meet on Friday. And they had already kind of tapped the CTO, Mira Maroti, as the next CEO. And on Friday, literally, Microsoft learns of Altman's firing, quote, "a minute before the world does." Again,

• 26:56Chris Benson?

  So it was on Friday that we heard it, actually, not Thursday, but yes.

• 26:59Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it happened while it got into motion on Thursday and then some of us heard about it on Friday. And apparently also Microsoft, which was just, you know, so I knew about the kind of convoluted corporate structure and all of that, but it was just mind boggling to me that Microsoft was not informed about about this, given their investment in the for-profit entity.

• 27:28Chris Benson?

  Which I think they have 49% stake in, if I recall correctly.

• 27:32Daniel Whitenack?

  Correct. Yeah, it's something like that. I don't remember the exact figure, but certainly they've invested over $10 billion with plans to invest 10-plus more billion dollars. And of course, they've integrated OpenAI, ChatGPT, et cetera, into Azure, into Bing, into Microsoft Office 365. And so, yeah, it just sort of boggles the mind that this happened in the way that it did. So then, on the 17th, then, OpenAI releases a statement that Sam Altman was ousted. And later that evening, Greg Brockman announces he's quitting.

• 28:18Chris Benson?

  They got rid of him as the chair. So he was fired as chair, but then he turned around. He was still president and he was, and he quit as president, standing to show Sam Altman that he stood with him.

• 28:29Daniel Whitenack?

  Okay. Well, that brings us to the point, Chris. Sam and Greg are out and Microsoft on that next Saturday, then kind of going day by day. Microsoft releases a statement saying that they, and I don't know if you saw the video, the Microsoft video, but essentially they immediately offered to hire Sam Altman into Microsoft.

• 28:56Chris Benson?

  And Greg and anybody that left OpenAI is would, would unroll.

• 29:00Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes. And I think I could tell in those videos, just the sort of still shock and unbelief in a lot of people. So Microsoft releases these statements. People of course start wondering like, why did this happen? This had to be something really bad that Sam did. Like, why would this ever happen? And there was some reporting and some statements that basically were kind of confusing and murky that they were saying, you know, no, it wasn't like any violation of security or privacy practices or kind of malfeasance on Sam's part. But you kind of got like these vague hints of, oh, he wasn't completely

• 29:45Daniel Whitenack?

  forthright with the board and his communication didn't allow them to properly make decisions. And so you get that kind of mix of, of stuff going on until November 19th, when Altman announces that he has been hired into this new research unit of, of Microsoft and posts on Twitter slash X, the mission continues.

• 30:11Chris Benson?

  And in the meantime, Mira, you know, was the first designated CEO. They had another CEO for another day on Sunday. And then a third one, you know, they, they went through CEOs like, yeah, you know, one a day for a while there.

• 30:26Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes, I, I was on my Zoom calls when I was hopping on, I was asking people if they had been asked by OpenAI to be the next CEO yet, because it seemed like they were working their way down a list. I don't know how far down the list I was, kind of sad I wasn't in that top 10, but they were definitely working their way down some type of list.

• 30:45Chris Benson?

  And I forget the name of the one that came after Mira, I just, it's escaping me right now while we're talking. But the OpenAI employees were reported to, on their internal Slack, were using, I'll gently say FU and showing the middle finger on their Slack. Apparently, the employees had had enough. By the time we got to midweekend and going from Saturday into Sunday, the employees started finding their voices, we'll hear about next.

• 31:10Daniel Whitenack?

  And there were reports basically that up to 95% of the employees within OpenAI were going to depart OpenAI if some deal wasn't struck to have Sam Altman return as CEO, which obviously would be the end of OpenAI, at least as we know it. So, I don't know, I could definitely tell you that, and this is one thing I'll highlight later on, is all of these people who have relied on OpenAI as the sort of bulwark of, of the industry and integrated this across their products, were really in a state of panic, right?

• 31:52Daniel Whitenack?

  Because it's like, hey, you know, the OpenAI is still saying they're going to provide great support for all this stuff, but also you're saying like, potentially 95% of your employees are leaving. So where does that leave all of these? So it was really kind of a time of reckoning where it's like, hey, you know, we've built a whole strategy around OpenAI's products and models. So now what? And, you know, the resilience of relying on this kind of single family of models, I think, really, really was showing in that moment.

• 32:26Chris Benson?

  If only there were services that could help people. Find a variety of different models and not be entirely dependent on a single family prediction card. I didn't say that.

• 32:37Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:38Chris Benson?

  Sorry.

• 32:38Daniel Whitenack?

  This is a point we'll make later, but I think it does. We even a few weeks ago had had some comments about with the executive order. Is there firming up of the market around these kind of foundation models because of the regulatory burdens that would start starting to be put on them? Right? And I think that this kind of opens up the field a little bit more regardless of what has played out with OpenAI. I think people are really wrestling with the fact of, hey, what else is out there? And of course, you've got amazing players in that space from Mistral to Mosaic ML to Meta and what they're doing with Llama 2. And people are really finding, you know, of course, we're helping prediction

• 33:23Daniel Whitenack?

  card, helping people build with these models, but a lot of people are finding a lot of success with these models. And I got a number of messages during this chaos about, hey, you know, we weren't thinking about trying open models or models outside of the GPT family prior to all of this craziness going on. But now we're wrestling with that, not necessarily over the fence yet in terms of a strategy around that. But it's definitely caused people to think a little bit more about this kind of market.

• 33:56Chris Benson?

  Yeah, having backup through diversity, if you will, in terms of model selection is now going to be in the, you know, corporate consideration for any significant organization going forward. We've seen the chaos and that will change the marketplace in general.

• 34:12Daniel Whitenack?

  So, correct, correct. That brings us all the way to November 21st of 2023. So this would be Tuesday, I believe, when OpenAI releases a statement that they've come to a, quote, "deal in principle" with Sam Altman to return as CEO.

• 34:34Daniel Whitenack?

  With a completely new board, which is chaired by former Salesforce co-CEO Brett Taylor. And so, one way you could take this is the sort of Silicon Valley venture-backed world one. Like, the board is now chaired by a leader in that space. And so, a big question mark kind of hangs over this. What about that original vision mission of the OpenAI nonprofit? Is that completely dead, or does it still exist? I think that's a real question to ask.

• 35:08Chris Benson?

  Yeah, if I was channeling the OpenAI marketing team, I would expect that they would say, absolutely, that still exists. That's a overriding mission. But I would also suggest that the marketplace is probably not convinced of that at this point in time.

• 35:23Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 35:24Chris Benson?

  Before we go on, I just want to point out one thing. Another big, big retro consideration that will not go quickly is the ability for the voice of the employees in a unified stand in such a corporate. You know, this was the biggest AI company in the world in the sense of mindshare and what they're doing in models. And the employees made this happen. When they said, you're not going to have an organization if you continue down this path, that made a big difference. And I think that's another thing that we will see play out in organizations going forward.

• 35:57Daniel Whitenack?

  Well, there is one more piece of the mystery puzzle here, Chris, which is now a meme in and of itself, I would say.

• 36:06Chris Benson?

  It is.

• 36:08Daniel Whitenack?

  So, they struck the deal with Sam Altman. And then Wednesday, November 22nd, if I'm getting the date right, there was reporting that ahead of Sam Altman's departure.

• 36:24Daniel Whitenack?

  Some researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors of OpenAI, telling them about this discovery or new model that was being worked on called Q*, Q* that they basically said was a threat to humanity. So this brought up new kind of questions around was Sam Altman not taking this seriously? And that's why he was fired? Or did it play in at all to this? And then, of course, immediately, in addition to all of those questions, people started speculating, well, what is Q*? And is it a threat to humanity? And there the memes started across the internet.

• 37:05Chris Benson?

  Our extended family got together for Thanksgiving, and I make a point of not bringing up AI. I mean, this is like, you know, we have broad family, lots of interests, not in AI in general, you know, or even technology in general. And this immediately came up as the first big topic. Everyone is scared about whether Q* is this threat to humanity? And it is not you and I and the rest of us AI folk talking about this. This is the general population. I was really quite startled to sit into the family's gathering and have that become the primary conversation. I was not expecting it.

• 37:39Daniel Whitenack?

  Of course, everybody's going wild about this, just like when they were going wild about, you know, anticipating what is GPT-5 or GPT-4.5? Or whatever the next thing from OpenAI is, there's always going to be this level of hype around it. I think what we can kind of practically know is maybe based on what they said, which is that the report basically said that this was a model that could maybe solve math problems better than previous models, which has always been a sticking point for these generative models. And the Q and the name kind of hints at this having some sort of reinforcement learning aspect to it,

• 38:20Daniel Whitenack?

  because one of the main kind of mechanisms within deep reinforcement learning is called Q-learning, which is kind of a mechanism by which an AI model or a policy model tries to predict the long-term return of making an action. So essentially, planning, which I think you also forwarded me a long LinkedIn post.

• 38:44Chris Benson?

  Yeah, Yann LeCun.

• 38:45Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Chris Benson?

  I'll read it. He weighed in because keeping in mind, prior to him, this came out a couple of days ago, he put it out, at least on LinkedIn, he probably put it out on Twitter, too. But it was exactly to your point right there. He had been watching several days of this kind of hysteria about Q Star and people panicking. And I will note that there were some pretty crazy news articles about it along the way. What Dr. Lacun said was, please ignore the deluge of complete nonsense about Q Star. One of the main challenges to improve LLM reliability is to replace autoregressive token prediction with planning, to your point, Daniel. Pretty much every top lab, and he names a few, is working on that, and some have already published ideas and results. It's likely that Q Star is OpenAI's attempt

• 39:32Chris Benson?

  at planning. They pretty much hired Noam Brown to work on this. And I think he was trying to get back to practical AI from his perspective.

• 39:44Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah, and I think this just represents a sort of wider rift in the AI research community as well, where you kind of have a race to dominate the market with new models kind of at odds with this really zealous promotion of like trying to prevent AI from advancing beyond our control. And so you see this playing out, not just at OpenAI, but elsewhere. And I think that led into some of the Q Star craziness. Well, in terms of retrospective, as we kind of, you know, we've told the whole story, we've stepped

• 40:23Daniel Whitenack?

  back and looked at OpenAI, there's definitely, from my perspective, some takeaways. Of course, I'm actively leading a company that is providing, hopefully trustworthy LLM APIs in enterprise environments that, you know, can be self-hosted. So my big takeaway, and I think what I was busy doing all week, was answering people's questions about, hey, if I don't have OpenAI, what is there? And it turns out that there's a lot. So, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be our APIs, but there's a lot of options around using enterprise models in a safe, secure environment that can be deployed under your

• 41:06Daniel Whitenack?

  control. And yes, there's kind of this balance to take around like-

• 41:12Daniel Whitenack?

  Hey, OpenAI's APIs are really good because they're a managed service, but they also have downsides. And I think you've seen this over time with other managed services, right? Like with running your own database, right? There's a trade-off, right? Between relying on a, especially if it's a one-off, unique hosted service that is a single point of failure versus kind of hosting your own or maybe having like your data spread out with different databases across your infrastructure. Like you see some of that kind of infrastructure concern and, you know, the concern around the resiliencies of these systems really playing out. And I think that we'll see other companies rise to that as well, right?

• 41:54Daniel Whitenack?

  There's going to be a new kind of wave of these companies that play off of what has happened over the past week to provide enterprise solutions.

• 42:04Chris Benson?

  Yeah, AI risk management as an industry field has been born. That's what's happened here.

• 42:09Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Chris Benson?

  AI isn't just the data science team that is going and either using APIs or in some cases using their, creating their models. You now have risk management as a formal corporate concept that everyone will be adopting and will go through all the ranks of every organization. So an entire new industry has been born out of this.

• 42:28Daniel Whitenack?

  Yes. Another point that I saw being made is this is kind of a wake-up call to regulators as well. You have companies testifying before Congress to tell them how maybe they should be regulated. But this is kind of a wake-up call that, hey, you know, maybe these companies aren't so good at regulating themselves that often. So maybe there needs to be a different way that we approach regulation of this technology. And I think, you know, you see other evidences of that. Coincidentally, around the same time, it seems that Meta has disbanded their responsible AI team.

• 43:12Daniel Whitenack?

  Now, I'm not making a comment on, I'm sure that they have other thought processes going around that, but it is an indication of maybe some of what was good faith efforts at this, but in practicality at odds with commercial pressures. So yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that plays out on the regulatory side as well.

• 43:34Chris Benson?

  I agree. There's another cultural, kind of in the large cultural issue regarding when as we're doing retrospective. If we go back just a few years on this podcast and not very far, if you really think about it. When the subject of artificial general intelligence, AGI, would come up. We didn't take it too seriously, you know, it was one of those things that wasn't wasn't really practical AI for us at the time. It was one of those someday, maybe, you know, kind of get there things. And I think that what we've seen in a couple of different waves, we saw it with chat GPT coming into being and the capabilities. And the fact that it hit the public's consciousness so intensely. And then, you know, the concern, no matter what Q star ends up being, regardless of what the outcome is.

• 44:20Chris Benson?

  Thanksgiving dinners were actually with people with genuine concern.

• 44:25Daniel Whitenack?

  Whether it's general or not, it's general in a certain way.

• 44:29Chris Benson?

  There you go, and the power of it and what that would mean for their own lives, even if they had nothing to do with the AI industry. And so what we've seen change in the large is that the notion of artificial general intelligence is entirely legitimate. To ponder, to be concerned about, to either fear or be excited about, or maybe a bit of all of the above. But that's a very different thing. If we were to go back a couple of years, we had a very, very different perspective.

• 44:57Daniel Whitenack?

  Well, with that, Chris, I think that's a good perspective to kind of bring us to a close here. It's been an interesting Thanksgiving week and on these episodes, we normally also try to provide some learning opportunities for people. There's one that I would like to highlight quickly, which I think will be a lot of fun. Some of you might have heard of Advent of Code, which is something that a lot of people do to learn new coding skills and try new things each holiday season. And I'm helping run an Advent of Generative AI Hackathon with Intel. So that's happening December 5th through the 11th. So I would encourage you, if you haven't been hands on with these technologies and with these models.

• 45:37Daniel Whitenack?

  This is a great way to kind of get into that without spending a bunch of money and learn from a lot of experts in the field. With access to really people that are working in this day to day. So check that out at adventofgenai.com. And we'll link that in the show notes, along with all of the many, many articles that have been written about OpenAI over the past week. So. Well, interesting week, Chris. Who knows what we'll be talking about next week, but I'm excited to do it.

• 46:08Chris Benson?

  You never know these days, I'll tell you what.

• 46:10Daniel Whitenack?

  Yeah.

• 46:10Chris Benson?

  We'll find out. Talk to you then, man.

• 46:21Speaker 00

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