Tech company OpenAI changes course, technology director resigns

This article was last updated on September 27, 2024

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Tech company OpenAI changes course, technology director resigns

Technology company OpenAI plans to overhaul its corporate structure. The maker of chatbot ChatGPT wants to permanently convert from a foundation to a for-profit company, reports Reuters news agency.

Around the same time this news broke, OpenAI technology director Mira Murati announced known on X to leave the artificial intelligence company. She says she does this to “make time and space for my own search”.

Battle of directions

Murati worked at OpenAI for 6.5 years, including a brief stint as CEO. That happened in November last year, when CEO Sam Altman was dismissed by the supervisory board. It was one of many developments during several weeks of crisis within the company. Ultimately, Altman returned as CEO within a week, under pressure from investor Microsoft.

The unrest last year stemmed from a battle of directions within the company. Part of the OpenAI leadership wanted a faster pace in technological development and more focus on profitability, while another part argued for safety and care.

In addition to Murati, two high-ranking researchers are now also leaving OpenAI. They are not the first to do so: co-founders Ilya Sutskever and John Schulman also left in recent months. Co-founder Greg Brockman announced last month that he would be taking a sabbatical in the near future.

OpenAI was already acting like a for-profit company.

Jelle Zuidema, associate professor of natural language processing at the UvA

The recent exodus is difficult to separate from the AI ​​company’s new direction. OpenAI started as a foundation in 2015, with the aim of “protecting society against uncontrollable AI systems”. Now it wants to become a for-profit company, in which the foundation still exists, but only has a minority share.

According to Reuters, the company is heading downwards a new investment round, with which it hopes to raise 6.5 billion dollars (about 5.8 billion euros). This values ​​the AI ​​company at around $150 billion. For comparison, OpenAI was still worth $14 billion in 2021. Tech companies such as Apple and chip manufacturer Nvidia are said to be interested in investing in the company.

In the new investment round, CEO Sam Altman would also receive 7 percent of the shares (worth the equivalent of 9.3 billion euros).

o1

According to Jelle Zuidema, associate professor of natural language processing at the UvA, little will change in the company’s working methods despite the new developments. “OpenAI was already acting like a for-profit company. The high market value of AI technologies puts enormous pressure on companies to push the boundaries.”

A few weeks ago launched the company o1, the self-proclaimed “first AI model that can reason on its own.” Zuidema: “OpenAI really needed a new attention grabber to make a new round of financing possible. They succeeded: with o1 they delivered something that surprises people. But they didn’t solve anything fundamental with it. o1 is a much more expensive model than previous models, because it also requires a lot of calculation time during use. It produces good reasoning examples, but also sometimes major errors.”

As a scientist, he says he is very concerned about the new developments. “When ChatGPT and image generators appeared, we as scientists immediately warned. With artificially generated images, texts and sound, it is difficult to distinguish fake from real. You need watermarks for that, but unfortunately there are commercial motives for not doing so. to do.”