The AI revolution has arrived a year after the historic release of ChatGPT, but any uncertainty about Big Tech’s dominance has been eliminated by the recent boardroom crisis at OpenAI, the company behind the super app.
In a sense, the covert introduction of ChatGPT on November 30 of last year was the geeks’ retaliation, the unsung engineers and researchers who have been working silently behind the scenes to develop generative AI.
With the release of ChatGPT, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—a well-known figure in the tech community but little known outside of it—ensured that this underappreciated AI technology would receive the attention it merits. ChatGPT became the fastest adopted app in history (since taken over by Meta’s Threads) as users marveled at the generation of poems, recipes — or whatever the internet could muster — in just seconds.
Thanks to his risk-taking, Altman, a 38-year-old Stanford dropout, became a household name and became a sort of AI philosopher king, with tycoons and world leaders following his every word.
Margaret O’Mara, a historian at the University of Washington and the author of “The Code,” a history of Silicon Valley, said that when it comes to AI, “you’re in the business of making and selling things you can’t put your hands on.”
“It’s crucial to have a figurehead who can explain things, especially when they involve cutting-edge technology,” she continued. “Fierce religious extremism”
Altman’s fervor for AI can come across as almost religious at times.
The proponents of OpenAI are sure that if they are allowed unrestricted access to funding and resources to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) that is on par with or superior to human intellect, the world will be a better place.
However, the enormous expenses of that holy mission compelled an alliance with Microsoft, the second-biggest corporation in the world, whose primary objective is profit rather than altruism.
Earlier this year, Microsoft committed US$13 billion (RM60.4 billion) to OpenAI; to help justify the investment, Altman put the company back on a profitable path.
This ultimately led to the boardroom uprising this month among those who think the money-makers should be kept at bay, among them the chief scientist of OpenAI.
After Altman was abruptly fired from OpenAI and then reinstated five days later, venture capitalist Dave Morin said in a podcast for The Information that there is “religious fundamentalism at play here.”
He continued, saying that the field of AI research has “almost deified this technology.”
When the conflict arose, Microsoft stood up for Altman, and the youthful employees of OpenAI also supported him. They understood that the company’s survival depended on the money generated by maintaining its computers, not on idealistic notions about the appropriate or inappropriate application of AI.
‘Capitalists won’
Whatever the next chapter for AI, it won’t get written without tech giants like Microsoft, which could soon land a seat on the company’s board in the fallout of the boardroom drama.
“We saw yet another Silicon Valley battle between the idealists and the capitalists, and the capitalists won,” said historian O’Mara.
Nor will the next chapter of AI get written without Nvidia, the manufacturer of AI’s secret ingredient, the graphics processing unit, or GPU, a powerful chip that is indispensible to train AI.
Tech giant, startup or researcher — everyone must get their hands on those Taiwan-made chips, which are both expensive and hard to come by.
Big tech companies — Microsoft, Amazon, Google — are at the front of the line.
The rush to AI ramps up fear of dangers such as human extinction, and societal concerns like bias, job displacement and disinformation on an industrial scale.
Users creating pornographic deepfakes of a classmate or biased AI weeding out loan applicants are where regulators should be focused, industry observers argue.
