BUSINESS OR NON-PROFIT? ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS AT THE CROSSROADS. SAM ALTMAN WANTS TO BE THE STEVE JOBS OF THE NEW WORLD. ALSO THANKS TO THE CRISIS OF CONSCIENCE OF AN ISRAELI SCIENTIST
It's too early to know how the first Artificial Intelligence war will end. What is certain, however, is that Hollywood screenwriters, fresh after the recent strike, will not miss out on a character like Ilya Sutskever, 37 years old, Israeli with a master's degree in Canada, scientific director of Open Ai. It was he, as a strong member of the board, who was the soul of the conspiracy which surprisingly, led last Friday to sacking of Sam Altman from the OpenAi guide. But, even more surprisingly, there is also his signature at the bottom letter from 700 employees (out of 777) which on Monday begged Altman himself to return to the helm of the company by giving up his job at Microsoft. A strange about-face you'd expect from a soap opera star, not from an austere math genius who felt betrayed by Altman's "lack of transparency."
Artificial intelligence: Altman's exit and the behind-the-scenes twists
But, the Wall Street Journal reconstructs, even geniuses have hearts and feelings. Ilya's change of heart arose in the night between Sunday and Monday after a dramatic, tearful confrontation with Anna Brockman, the wife of the sacked president, Altman's main collaborator. At the end of the face-to-face meeting with the indomitable Anna, whose wedding Ilya was best man in 2019, the scientist gave in. “I will do anything – he tweeted – to mend the rift”.
In reality, in addition to the emotion of affection, the circumstance that only a handful of employees of the jewel of Silicon Valley had shown up at the headquarters on Sunday to meet the new CEO, Emmett Shear, weighed heavily: the night of the long knives was over even before it began . Meanwhile, purchase orders for Microsoft began to flow on Wall Street, enriched by the arrival of the child prodigy of Artificial Intelligence.
Artificial intelligence: the real dilemma, profit or non-profit?
Everything like before? Probably not because the rift in OpenAi, the prime mover of the stock market boom in 2023 even more thunderous than the take-off of the Internet at the end of the millennium, does not depend on the moods of the protagonists but on a whirlwind of billions behind which a dilemma arises: Can Artificial Intelligence be governed by a non-profit institution or must it end up in the hands of business and power? Open Ai's statute represents a sort of compromise between the two tendencies: the system is governed by the four wise men of the board who cannot own shares but are completely independent from the for-profit company created by Altman (which does not own shares of Open Ai) to reap the benefits of the business generated by the system. But, over time, the subsidiary in which Microsoft, with a 49% stake, invested a whopping 13 billion dollars, gradually took off. For the satisfaction of the employees and researchers who hold a good portion of the 51% of the share capital which, under Altman's management, has come to be worth 90 billion dollars. A nice nest egg that risks vanishing, at least in part, after Altman's exit from OpenAi. Hence a less noble explanation of the affections' motion that pushed the employees to ask for the boss's return.
OpenAi and Sam Altman, Steve Jobs and Apple: talents compared
But, beyond the pocketbook problems of Silicon Valley workers, the match involving Sam Altman takes us back to the heart of the American myth personified by Steve Jobs. Even Altman, like the father of Apple, adopted the motto "I have no intention of doing the things the market asks for. I'm the one who will tell the market where to go." And there are quite a few who have compared the talents of Jobs and those of Altman after the latter had the strength and courage to launch a year ago Chat GPT, overcoming obstacles of all kinds. And we are only at the beginning: on Friday morning, while the conspirators were planning his defenestration, Altman told San Francisco that ChatGPT subscribers had exceeded the threshold of 100 million users and that the company would soon halve the price of its software, along with the launch of ChapGPT stores. Other than non-profit, the priests of purity in non-profit research thought. Also because Altman was attracting new partners, such as the cosmetics leader Estée Lauder or thinking about expanding the board to managers who have very little to do with the original inspiration of the system.
And so his dismissal is closely remembered Jobs' ouster from Apple in 1985, decided by a board that rejected his leadership systems rather than his ideas, too ahead of its time. And it took eleven years for the great Steve to return to the helm of Apple for life with the iPad and iPhone. It will take much less to see Altman at the helm of Artificial Intelligence again. We don't know, however, with which shirt. In reality, as the York Times points out, Altman does not have a great reputation as a scientist or technologist worthy of thelegacy of Steve Jobs. But, at 38, he has demonstrated that he has the intuition of a business man, capable of riding the idea of adventure as the markets like it. And to make it your own chip revolution as he is developing it Nvidia, the jewel developed by Taiwanese engineer Jensen Huang, which leads the Wall Street earnings chart, after having tripled its price since February.
