Drama around Sam Altman. How Microsoft bought OpenAI for zero dollars – Echo24.cz

Since last November, when the OpenAI organization released the ChatGPT chatbot to the public, the wave of greatest interest has passed. Until now, artificial intelligence has come with a new piece that no one expected – with an unprecedented corporate drama. Jokes about her being portrayed in an HBO miniseries don’t have to be completely absurd.

So far, we know very little about what was up to whom. We know three things: As corporate structures, non-profits have certainly not proven themselves. Second, money, whose role should have been minimized in OpenAI’s corporate structure, instead asserted its power. Finally, people working on the development of artificial intelligence are as capable of cult-like behavior showing signs of religious fervor as anyone else.

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit organization. A number of tech stars pledged a billion dollars (not all of which was repaid) to an organization whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence, not for profit, but for the sake of it. The organization is governed by a board of directors, which does not represent the interests of investors, as is usual, but “all humanity”. In principle, the Council nominates itself, the members choose their successors.

In 2018, it became clear to researchers that the financial needs of developing artificial intelligence were much greater than they had imagined, and they came up with an idea: A non-profit would establish a for-profit entity that would seek to develop commercializable products and be able to invest in it. But investors’ returns are capped – from seven times to a hundred times their investment, depending on how early they invested. The rest remains in the non-profit, which also retains control. The vast majority of those investments, about 13 billion, were made by Microsoft.

The soul of the company has basically been thirty-eight-year-old Sam Altman since the beginning. Earned as a partner in the famous startup incubator Y Combinator. Then came OpenAI, and Altman is practically the face of artificial intelligence today. For broad layers, for accelerationists among experts, for politicians, in front of whom they can speak much more skillfully than other heads of technology companies. And last but not least, for the OpenAI employees, whose behavior shows, without exaggeration, signs of adoration.

The week before last, the board announced on the X Network, formerly Twitter (which hasn’t lost its popularity among tech folks) that it had fired Sam Altman. She surprised the employees, Microsoft and the whole world.

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