The AI industry was rocked by a series of dramatic events last week involving OpenAI, the company behind the popular AI bot ChatGPT. The company fired its chief executive, Sam Altman, on November 17, only to reinstate him five days later after a massive employee backlash. In the meantime, Microsoft, which has a $13 billion investment in OpenAI, offered Altman a job to lead a new advanced AI research team. The saga has exposed the tension between commercial growth and ethical impact in the AI sector.
Altman’s firing came as a shock to many in the tech world, as the company did not give detailed reasons for the decision. The OpenAI board said that Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”. However, some speculate that the firing might have been triggered by a conflict between those who wanted to pursue commercial growth and those who were concerned about the potential societal impacts of AI.
The latter group might have been uneasy with the rapid development and deployment of ChatGPT, which has been hailed as a breakthrough in natural language processing, but also criticized for its potential misuse. For instance, ChatGPT could be used to generate fake news, spam, or phishing messages. Moreover, ChatGPT works by finding patterns in existing data, which can lead to the reinforcement of historical biases and social injustices.
Altman’s firing sparked a strong reaction from the OpenAI employees, who rallied behind him and threatened to follow him to Microsoft unless he was reinstated. Microsoft, which uses OpenAI technology to power its search engine Bing, had offered Altman a job to lead a new advanced AI research team. Altman’s return to OpenAI came after hundreds of company employees signed a letter of support for him.
The drama at OpenAI has highlighted the challenges facing the AI industry, as it grapples with the trade-off between commercial interests and ethical considerations. Sarah Myers West, managing director of the AI Now Institute, a policy-research organization based in New York City, says, “The push to retain dominance is leading to toxic competition. It’s a race to the bottom”.
Computer scientist Geoffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in Canada, a pioneer of deep learning, is deeply concerned about the speed of AI development. “If you specify a competition to make a car go as fast as possible, the first thing you do is remove the brakes,” he says.
West emphasizes that highlight how just a few companies with the money and computing resources to feed AI wield a lot of power — something she thinks needs more scrutiny from anti-trust regulators. “Regulators for a very long time have taken a very light touch with this market,” says West. “We need to start by enforcing the laws we have right now.”
Relevant articles:
– What the OpenAI drama means for AI progress — and safety – Nature
– OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman returns after sudden ousting: A timeline
– Sociable: Will chaos at OpenAI benefit social media’s AI projects …
– Economic impacts research at OpenAI