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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Breaking news overnight, a stunning new twist in the power struggle over the future of the company behind ChatGPT. Sam Altman, the co-founder and ousted leader, will now return to OpenAI as CEO.
--:-- Noel King: We know that these negotiations have been going on in the last 24 hours. The soap opera. I don't know if it's officially over, but I think we're in extra innings at this point.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Sam Altman's shocking ouster from his company on Friday became a back-inster late yesterday. Now the man who some people feared had too much power in the world of artificial intelligence has even more power and the backing of a friendlier board.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up on Today Explained, five days that shook the tech world. A November to remember. You can't keep a good Sam down. You know what? I bet ChatGPT could write something better. Hang on.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for Today Explained comes from Saks Fifth Avenue. Fall is here. Might be time to find some nice new pieces you can wear again and again.
--:-- Noel King: With Saks Fifth Avenue, it can be a breeze to shop for your personal style, like maybe a relaxed Prada blazer or Gucci loafers that are great for both work and the weekend.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: This is very Sean. This is very Sean-coated. Gucci loafers.
--:-- Noel King: Saks says Saks makes shopping feel totally customized to you, whether that's from an in-store stylist or a visit to Saks.com, where they can show you just what you want to see.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: They say they'll even let you know when arrivals from your favorite designers are in or when something you've been eyeing is back in stock.
--:-- Noel King: You can find inspiration for your personal style every day at Saks Fifth Avenue.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Support for this show comes from Strawberry.me. Be honest. Are you happy with your job? Or are you stuck in one you've outgrown? Or never wanted in the first place?
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You're listening to Today Explained. I'm Sigal Samuel. I'm a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So OpenAI is a really unusual tech company. It was initially founded in 2015 together with Elon Musk, a name you may or may not have ever heard of before.
--:-- Noel King: And the goal was to really focus on researching AI safety, so how to make advanced AI, but how to make sure that it's going to be safe and beneficial to all humanity. That's the mission.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: My worst fears are that we cause significant, we, the field, the technology, the industry, cause significant harm to the world.
--:-- Noel King: I think that could happen in a lot of different ways. It's why we started the company.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Okay, so founded in 2015, and then where does it go from there?
--:-- Noel King: So from there, you know, at the beginning, it's a pretty low-key thing. You know, it's doing its own, like, research like so many other groups.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: But it progressively makes more and more advances, especially in the realm of large language models, the kind of AI that eventually culminated in what we now know as ChatGPT.
--:-- Noel King: But, you know, at first it was like pretty quiet. They were having very cautious launches.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And then a year ago, almost exactly a year ago, they ended up launching ChatGPT, which really sort of rocketed OpenAI to becoming a household name.
--:-- Noel King: And ChatGPT is that application that lets you type in a question or the beginning of a prompt, and then it will fill in the rest of the text for you.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So you can write the first line of a poem, say, and ask it to complete the rest. It'll complete the rest of the poem for you.
--:-- Noel King: So it does an amazing job with language. GPT-4 takes what you prompt it with and just runs with it.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: From one perspective, it's a tool, a thing you can use to get useful tasks done in language.
--:-- Noel King: From another perspective, it's a system that can make dreams, thoughts, ideas flourish in text in front of you.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: The funny thing is that when they initially launched, they said in-house, this is just going to be a low-key research preview.
--:-- Noel King: And lo and behold, it becomes like the fastest growing, you know, such app in history.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And OpenAI becomes incredibly famous overnight.
--:-- Noel King: And this kind of propels OpenAI into a situation where it's pushing more and more for commercialization.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: It's pushing out products aggressively and quickly.
--:-- Noel King: And it's starting to look less and less like the company it was originally founded to be, which was supposed to be very careful, very sober, very safety conscious.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Tell me about ex-CEO Sam Altman. Who's he?
--:-- Noel King: So Sam Altman is in many ways a classic kind of Silicon Valley entrepreneur, pretty famous in the startup world from his work at Y Combinator.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: He's really known as, at this point, the poster boy for AI.
--:-- Noel King: He has kind of become synonymous with AI, I think, like for much of the public because of his role launching products like ChatGPT and because he's at the helm of OpenAI.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: He's not just a big deal in Silicon Valley. He has become the face of AI or at least one of the main faces of AI.
--:-- Noel King: He's testified before Congress. He's met with CEOs.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And, you know, ChatGPT has really been the AI product in generative AI that has changed the perception of its abilities earlier this year.
--:-- Noel King: And he is intertwined with all of that.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: He's a fantastic salesman. I'll say that.
--:-- Noel King: He's really been able to kind of push OpenAI's vision for AI into the mainstream.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Is he good at his job? What's his reputation like in Silicon Valley? Do people like this guy? Is he expedient? Is he high-functioning?
--:-- Noel King: I think that he's actually really well-liked in the Valley.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: You know, as we've seen recently, you know, he has a lot of backing from the staff of OpenAI.
--:-- Noel King: There's a lot of people who are really, really in his corner. They're Team Sam, ride or die.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: In terms of Sam, I mean, look, this was his baby. He brought in these people.
--:-- Noel King: It seems to be quite a culture of love literally this weekend They were all tweeting hearts at each other different color hearts
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So yeah he is well
--:-- Noel King: There also a reputation in some quarters though for alleged manipulation, deceitfulness.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So there are some people who are not overwhelmingly happy on personal grounds.
--:-- Noel King: And there's also critics on an intellectual level of his approach to AI, which in recent months and years has become seemingly less focused on keep AI safe and mitigate the risks and more focused on let's rush to market, let's make a profit, let's commercialize.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Sigal, can you walk us through what has happened over the past five days, five and a half days, starting late Friday?
--:-- Noel King: Absolutely. It's been a complete roller coaster.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Friday, late afternoon, we're all getting ready to wind up for a nice, quiet weekend.
--:-- Noel King: Little did we know, news was about to drop that would basically be an earthquake in the tech world.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So OpenAI announces that they're firing Sam Altman, the CEO.
--:-- Noel King: He's being fired by the board.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: The board releases a very vague kind of cryptic statement that they're firing him because he has not been consistently candid in his communications with the board.
--:-- Noel King: They go on to say the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So it seems like there's some alleged lack of transparency.
--:-- Noel King: And the board has decided in a kind of boardroom coup to suddenly get rid of him.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Altman was notified about that via video meeting on Friday that he had been fired.
--:-- Noel King: And Greg Brockman, who was not part of that meeting, although he's the chair of the board, he was stripped of that role.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: He was told he was going to be the president of the company, but he quit in protest on Friday night.
--:-- Noel King: Several other executives and senior researchers also resigned.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: This was done by just a small board who, it should be noted, is the board of the nonprofit of OpenAI.
--:-- Noel King: And this is a bit of a funny detail, but it's important for the story.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: OpenAI was initially founded as a nonprofit. It later spun up a for-profit arm.
--:-- Noel King: But the nonprofit board is really in control of the bigger picture.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And it has control of firing and firing.
--:-- Noel King: And the board's mission is not to protect, you know, investors.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: It's not to protect employees.
--:-- Noel King: It's to protect humanity.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: It is to safeguard the best interests of humanity.
--:-- Noel King: So for whatever its reasons weren't made clear initially, it said it's firing Sam.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: The company president, Greg Brockman, gets super upset about this and he quits in protest.
--:-- Noel King: All right. On Saturday, suddenly, the pair is trying to get the board to reinstate them.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: They're going to Open AI. They're trying to negotiate.
--:-- Noel King: Negotiations don't go their way.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Sam Altman posts a funny picture on Twitter, on X, where he has to wear like a visitor badge going to OpenAI.
--:-- Noel King: He's like, this is the first and last time I'm ever wearing one of these.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And meanwhile, the whole staff of OpenAI, not the whole, but a huge majority, starts to revolt in Sam's favor.
--:-- Noel King: They're really upset that he's been fired.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: By Sunday, both Sam and Greg have accepted jobs with Microsoft, which is the major investor in OpenAI.
--:-- Noel King: In a cryptic post this morning, Altman said of his new role, the mission continues.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And Microsoft is like super happy.
--:-- Noel King: They're saying, yeah, this is fine. This is great.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Sam and Greg can continue working on their cutting-edge AI in-house here at Microsoft.
--:-- Noel King: We chose to explicitly partner with OpenAI, and we want to continue to do so.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And obviously that depends on the people of OpenAI and staying there or coming to Microsoft.
--:-- Noel King: So I'm open to both options.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: But this is like turning into a huge problem for OpenAI, because more and more OpenAI employees are now threatening to leave for Microsoft as well.
--:-- Noel King: Get this, more than 700 employees, that's 95% of the companies, They say they are ready to follow Altman to Microsoft, where he's set to build a new AI venture.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: They've signed this letter calling for OpenAI's board of directors to resign in full and then reinstate Altman.
--:-- Noel King: And the letter states, we are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment, and care for our mission and employees.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Okay. By Tuesday, new reports are indicating, hey, guess what? Altman and Brockman are back in talks.
--:-- Noel King: Are still in talks about a possible return to OpenAI, even though when we went to sleep the night before, we all thought they were safely at Microsoft.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So this was like a huge chaos.
--:-- Noel King: And then just when you thought it couldn't get any wilder, late, late, late Tuesday night, when we were all contentedly about to finally go to sleep, it is announced that actually OpenAI has reached an agreement, at least in principle, to reinstate Sam Altman.
--:-- Noel King: He and Greg are going to be back at OpenAI.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Greg is posting like pictures on Twitter on X now of like what seems like a huge proportion of the staff celebrating, cheering.
--:-- Noel King: And OpenAI folks are saying, we're back. Like we are so back.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Okay. They are back.
--:-- Noel King: And what about the board that fired Sam Altman?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Yeah. So the board has now had a shakeup of its own.
--:-- Noel King: So basically, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman have agreed, at least for the time being, to not have a seat on the board.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: But Helen Toner, who, you know, was on the board and who really, it seems like she was castigated by Sam for writing a academic paper that appeared to be critical of OpenAI's approach to AI safety.
--:-- Noel King: She's now off the board.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And instead, we've now got Brett Taylor, who is an early Facebook officer and was also helming Salesforce.
--:-- Noel King: And we've got Larry Summers, who's a former Treasury Department secretary.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: The only one who was on the board previously and is still on the board is Adam D'Angelo, who's in charge of Quora.
--:-- Noel King: So it's really a big change.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: There's also talk that Microsoft may later insist on having some kind of place on the board whether that an active role or at an observer observer role on the board so they don get caught out unawares like they did you know in the past few days
--:-- Noel King: Does it strike you as weird that the two women are off the board replaced by two men?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Yeah. This is an industry that's not necessarily friendly to women.
--:-- Noel King: And what Helen Toner did took a lot of guts.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And that's sadly not always rewarded in these contexts.
--:-- Noel King: Like we're talking about the end of the world. I mean, that's what strikes me.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: It's like, OK, the dynamic seems to be the women were holding us back.
--:-- Noel King: And now we can go and we can we can have Terminator time.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: OK, so it has been five days, five days of roller coaster.
--:-- Noel King: Is Sam Altman coming back to the same company he left or has OpenAI been fundamentally changed by this drama?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: I think that OpenAI has been fundamentally changed by this nutty drama in Sam's favor.
--:-- Noel King: I think that he's a winner of all of this because he's back and he's now going to have a board that's much more friendly to his approach.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: The people on the board who were, you know, from his perspective, maybe reigning him in, trying to hold him back, they're gone.
--:-- Noel King: And now he's got on the board a bunch of dudes who, you know, I think it's fair to say AI safety is maybe not their top concern here.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So I think Sam has freer reign now to do, you know, what he thinks is the best approach.
--:-- Noel King: And what with the staff having mutinied in his favor and then Sam being reinstated on the back of that, I think it shows Sam to be in a position of huge power.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: I think this is basically like a major consolidation of his power at the company.
--:-- Noel King: Coming up, a fault line runs through it. The profound existential fears that led to this week's chaos at OpenAI. Sigal Samuel will be back with us.
--:-- Noel King: Sigal, let's start this way. You wrote for Vox recently that OpenAI is a company built on a fault line. What did you mean by that?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Yeah, so the fault line was OpenAI's dual mission, which is simultaneously to build AI that's as smart as or smarter than humanity, while also making sure that that AI will be safe and beneficial to all of humanity.
--:-- Noel King: That's part of our mission is to really make sure that we have an answer for like how humanity continues to fit in and continues to be the end beneficiary of all these systems kind of almost no matter how smart they get.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: There's like an inherent tension over there because, you know, if you've got super advanced AI, it could theoretically harm people in a variety of ways.
--:-- Noel King: And I don't just mean like Terminator scenarios. Hasta la vista, baby.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: I mean, everything from entrenching bias against minority groups to enabling bioterrorism or man-made pandemics.
--:-- Noel King: And I think inevitably that was going to lead to some fracturing.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Okay, so there are people on this board who were more cautious about the future of AI, and there are people on the board who were more incautious, who were like, yeah, probably the worst won't happen.
--:-- Noel King: But I wonder if you can talk us through the perspective of people in Silicon Valley who are afraid of what AI is capable of.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Because we see AI scientists being polled and some of them saying, oh, yeah, almost casually, it seems, yeah, this could bring about the end of mankind, the extinction of humanity.
--:-- Noel King: And I think what we really want to understand is, are those concerns legitimate?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Yeah I think like these the people who really worry about this are kind of sometimes classed in one way as like they called the doomers in this world But there really a spectrum of people right
--:-- Noel King: There's some people who like really think, wow, this is for sure going to kill all of us.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And, you know, it's some kind of like Terminator scenario or like really sci-fi sounding scenario.
--:-- Noel King: And they're imagining maybe an AI that gets smarter than humans and right, all of that.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: But like you don't even need to go that far to be really genuinely worried you could actually just have AIs that are like pretty dumb right like it would just to say like you know just only as smart as me or something or you know an average person you're very smart but you know
--:-- Noel King: The thing is if you have enough of those AIs that are not like super smart but they're working in tandem and especially if they're you know working with a human actor who's a malicious actor that could do a lot a lot of damage.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So, you know, like you don't need to be a way out there doomer to be like legitimately concerned about what AI could do, even before it gets to a hypothetical smarter than human stage, just like a reasonably smart stage.
--:-- Noel King: There could be a lot of risk.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: There could be a lot of risk.
--:-- Noel King: And with Sam Altman coming back and the composition of the board being changed to favor the risk takers, do we get the sense that there is now a broad agreement that perhaps a cautious people were being overcautious or overstating the case.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Yeah, I think there is a sense like that.
--:-- Noel King: And it's funny because you hear a lot of people saying like, oh, the cautious people were overstating the case.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: But regardless of your opinion on that, I think just having Sam and Greg back and having a board that now is not very safety conscious should maybe make you feel at least a little concerned, even if you're not worried about like real doomsday scenarios, but you're just worried about like other risks of AI, like entrenching or perpetuating bias against women or people of color or misinformation.
--:-- Noel King: Like even if you're just worried about things like that, this is all on the continuum of safety and risk.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And maybe you want leaders who are concerned about protecting safety and mitigating risk.
--:-- Noel King: What OpenAI has said in recent months is like they've made it explicit that their real number one focus is getting to AGI, artificial general intelligence, which is as smart as or smarter than humans.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And that has increasingly become kind of like the holy grail that the leaders are pushing towards.
--:-- Noel King: And the concern is like, are they pushing towards that dream at any cost?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And over the past few months, it really seems like they're more and more determined to get to AGI, even if there's like warnings along the way that maybe this isn't great for safety.
--:-- Noel King: And by the way, did we ever pull humanity and agree that we want AGI? Is that even something that should exist? Like, who knows?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: But they're charging full steam ahead.
--:-- Noel King: Artificial intelligence is a race. There are a lot of companies that want to win this race.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: OpenAI seemed to be winning because of chat GPT. It was the coolest thing ever.
--:-- Noel King: It was really performing.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: And with Sam Altman out, I think you could speculate that another company could win the race or at least be in the running in a new kind of way.
--:-- Noel King: Sam's now back at OpenAI. Does that mean OpenAI has won the race, is winning the race, is sure to win the race? Where does this leave the race for artificial intelligence?
--:-- Sigal Samuel: First of all, like, for humanity, if this is treated as a race, that's a really bad thing.
--:-- Noel King: Like, we shouldn't want it to be treated as a race because that's going to be a race to the bottom.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: Unfortunately, the race continues.
--:-- Noel King: I think that Sam would have continued that whether he was at Microsoft or at OpenAI.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: I think it should be noted that OpenAI has done more than any other company to catalyze the arms race kind of mentality, especially with its release of ChatGPT a year ago and with all that it's been kind of pushing to market quickly since.
--:-- Noel King: So I think this just basically continues the race and OpenAI continues to be at the front of the pack.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: So at the end of the day, you know, if you ask the question, did OpenAI's board make the right decision when it fired Sam or did it make the right decision when it rehired him, paradoxically, I think the answer might be yes to both.
--:-- Noel King: I think if they saw something that made them concerned that Sam was taking the company in direction that was not super safety conscious, and remember, their mandate is to protect the best interests of humanity, not of open AI, then it was right to get rid of him.
--:-- Sigal Samuel: But at the same time, when the conditions then changed such that it looked like there might be a mass exodus of OpenAI's top talent to Microsoft, a company that seems significantly less safety conscious, it might have actually been the wisest move to rehire Sam, Greg, and keep in-house all of that top talent so that at least they're at a company that is, we could say, at least nominally committed to AI safety and has some, you know, kind of direction on them that's going to keep them caring about safety, as opposed to pushing them straight into the arms of Microsoft, where they could potentially develop AGI in a less safety conscious environment.
--:-- Noel King: That was Sigal Samuel. She's a senior reporter for Vox's Future Perfect.
--:-- Noel King: Today's episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Isabel Angell, engineered by David Herman and Rob Byers, and hosted by Noel King.
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--:-- Noel King: Today Explained, the podcast is off Thursday and Friday of this week. New episodes drop on Monday.
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--:-- Noel King: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. Thank you.
