The crazy corporate fight in OpenAI must end with altruism giving way to profits
OpenAI, a nonprofit, has seen an amazing corporate battle playing out over the past few days. Last week, the Board summarily sacked CEO Sam Altman and President Greg Brockman. Both are co- founders.
Microsoft, which has committed $10 billion to the development of OpenAI’s headline product, ChatGPT, promptly offered Altman and Brockman lead roles in a new Microsoft AI development project. Meanwhile, almost every employee of the 770-strong workforce at OpenAI signed an open letter demanding that the board resign and Altman be reinstated. Today, that happened with Altman’s return as CEO along with an entirely new board.
At the heart of this conflict is an ideological battle: profit-making versus altruism. OpenAI is a nonprofit with a stated aim to develop artificial intelligence (AI) to aid humanity while navigating the apparent risks and dangers. It has a for-profit subsidiary, Open AI LLP, which runs ChatGPT and generates over $1 billion in annual revenue.
It is valued at $80-90 billion on the basis of the monies Microsoft and other investors have poured into it. Altman’s strategy appears to be to monetize ChatGPT, and most of OpenAI’s highly skilled workforce seem to agree. If the subsidiary gets publicly listed via an IPO, they stand to be handsomely rewarded.
That apart, keeping ChatGPT strictly non-commercial looks like a lost cause. It is already embedded into multiple commercial products including Microsoft’s Bing and GitHub. At OpenAI’s First Developer Day, Altman announced a new set of plug-ins that would allow third parties to customise ChatGPT.
The rush to sign up crashed OpenAI’s servers. There are multiple, unabashedly commercial rivals being rolled out as well. Google has Bard, Meta has Llama, and X has Grok.
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