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Mahesh

26/11/23 12:31 PM IST

Factors that led to the turmoil at OpenAI

In News
  • OpenAI, the company that is at the cutting edge of the AI revolution, almost ceased to exist over the last weekend. Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of the company that runs ChatGPT, was ousted by its board of directors on Friday, November 17 only to be reinstated on Tuesday, November 21.
Working of Open AI
  • OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organisation by a group that included the then 30-year-old Sam Altman, Elon Musk, and Infosys, among others, with the vision that Artificial Intelligence research must be kept open, safe and available to everyone.
  • Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return..
  • The Generative Pre-Trained Transformers or GPT models that sit at the heart of many AI tools need to be trained on vast amounts of data, which require massive amounts of ‘compute’ or computing power.
Microsoft and OpenAI
  • Microsoft was with OpenAI before it had made a name for itself. Between 2019 and 2022, it is reported to have pumped in up to $3 billion in Open AI — an investment that appeared prescient once ChatGPT appeared on the scene and OpenAI’s valuation shot up to $29 billion.
  • In January 2023, Microsoft added $10 billion to the kitty, mostly as much-needed computing power from its Azure cloud computing platform.
  • OpenAI’s charter itself speaks of safely building an AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence, an AI capable of reasoning like humans unlike the generative AIs that we have that only create based on what it has ‘learned’.
  • Effective Altruists tend to push back against the ‘techno optimists’ and ‘accelerationists’, who believe that the benefits of technology outweigh the bad and that all technological developments need to be accelerated as it is the way forward for mankind.
  • The effective altruism proponents on OpenAI’s board seem to have been spooked by the rapid commercialisation of the company and feared that it was deviating from its original purpose, playing into the hands of accelerationists.
  • They may have been trying to recapture the narrative but bungled up the effort.
Source - The Hindu

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