This morning, OpenAI – the firm behind ChatGPT – rehired its chief executive, Sam Altman, after it fired him on Friday. Altman is the most prominent ambassador for the world of artificial intelligence, and was set to join Microsoft after leaving the company. After his sacking, more than 95 per cent of OpenAI’s employees demanded that the board leave and reinstate him. Many staff were threatening to quit the lab, and Microsoft had agreed to match their pay. Today, OpenAI caved and welcomed him back.
What’s going on here? Did a firm that was set up to make AI ‘for the benefit of humanity’, whose whole idea was to not be dictated by the whims of the market, forget itself?
I spoke to Gary Marcus, whose Substack is one of the most interesting around. He is professor emeritus of psychology and neural science at New York University, and founded a machine learning company – Geometric Intelligence – that was later bought by Uber.
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