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1. Sam Altman to join Microsoft after OpenAI rejects his return, hiring pro-AI safety Emmet Shear as interim CEO
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made the announcement:
Microsoft stock is +2% in the premarket
OpenAIās new interim CEO Shear recently said he was in favor of semi-pausing AI development
Shearās p(doom) is 5-50%, he recently said on a podcast.
Previously, Ilya Sutskever and 3 other board directors led the firing of Sam Altman, reportedly fearing he was not taking AI safety seriously
The DevDay announcements infuriated Sutskever and his allies. In particular, the launch of customized versions of ChatGPT and the announcement that OpenAI would allow these GPTs to operate tasks independently.
New CEO Shear denies this report: āThe board did not remove Sam over any specific disagreement on safety, their reasoning was completely different from that.ā
Altman was trying to raise $10B+ for a TPU chip company, code-named Tigris, to compete with NVIDIA, and for a hardware company with former Apple design chief Jony Ive.
Only a fraction of Microsoft's $10B investment has been wired. A āsignificant portionā of the funding, divided in tranches, are Azure credits, rather than cash.
OpenAI's $86B valuation share sale was put on hold.
Elon Musk, who originally recruited Sutskever, suggested the firing indicates that AGI may be near
Our view: this was a semi-failed coup of AI doomers, who want to slow down AI progress until AI alignment is solved
Doomers think the odds of AI killing humanity are high, that current AI development is too fast, and that more efforts should be placed on alignment research.
Centrists believe this risk is manageable.
e/acc generally either believe this risk doesnāt exist, or that AI itself will be able to solve problems that arise from AI.
Altmanās firing should lead to OpenAIās progress being slowed, as employees and investors flee.
But Microsoft and others will continue to be able to accelerate AI development.
Our view: board control matters, and OpenAI's complicated structure left all the power to the parent nonprofit's board
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