Speaker 1: Welcome to crash Course, a podcast about business, political, and
Speaker 1: social disruption and what we can learn from it. I'm
Speaker 1: Tim O'Brien. Today's crash course open Ai versus Sam Altman.
Speaker 1: Open Ai, which you may have heard a lot about lately,
Speaker 1: is the company that developed chat Gpt, a wildly popular
Speaker 1: AI bot which you most certainly have heard of. Open
Speaker 1: AI's board of directors recently purged to the company's CEO,
Speaker 1: Sam Altman. High drama ensued, and various stakeholders, employees, investors.
Speaker 1: Microsoft saw to it that Altman was reinstated. The board
Speaker 1: itself then faced a purge. Oh my, this particular collision
Speaker 1: has it all Silicon Valley innovation in Silicon Valley hubris, money,
Speaker 1: managerial snafoos, ugly battles, promising outcomes, and of course, artificial
Speaker 1: intelligence AI is set to transform the world. We're told
Speaker 1: ingenuity and upheaval and open ai offer a way for
Speaker 1: us to consider all of that. So I've invited parme
Speaker 1: Olsen and Dave Lee onto crash Course to help us
Speaker 1: outline the lessons of this particular tale. They are both
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinion technology columnists. Parmey It's based in London and
Speaker 1: Davi is in New York and they bring a wealth
Speaker 1: of experience and insight to today's show. Welcome my friends,
Speaker 1: Thanks him, thank you. Let's start with Sam Altman himself.
Speaker 1: Eric Schmidt, Google's former CEO, recently compared Altman to Steve
Speaker 1: Jobs and said Open Eyes Board was wrong to can
Speaker 1: him and I quote Schmidt here, these founder CEO types
Speaker 1: are unusual, they're incredibly valuable, and they change the world.
Speaker 1: Schmidt said that at a recent Axios conference. Dave, what
Speaker 1: do you think of that observation about founder CEOs and
Speaker 1: the sort of idea that there's a unicorn executive out
Speaker 1: there who is indispensable.
Speaker 2: I think, look, that's always been Tilicon Valley view of
Speaker 2: you know, great founders and what they can do, and
Speaker 2: this idea that you should follow a founder's vision rather
Speaker 2: than say put it to committee. And you know, Steve
Speaker 2: Job's obviously the most famous example of that. Kicked out
Speaker 2: of Apple, returned again around a decade later, and of course,
Speaker 2: you know, the rest is history, and what happened with
Speaker 2: Apple surely wouldn't have happened without Steve Jobs coming back.
Speaker 2: And we've seen this since again and again, whether it's
Speaker 2: you know, Mark Zuckerberg or elor Musk or any sort
Speaker 2: of tech founder, even people like Travis Kalonick, you know,
Speaker 2: who founded Uber. There's this sense that there's this founder skill,
Speaker 2: this magic, this uniqueness that should really be sort of
Speaker 2: listened to, and although it can be questioned, you know,
Speaker 2: there's a sort of bias towards always backing the founder.
Speaker 2: Speaking of Sam Altman, of the many comments made about
Speaker 2: Altman over the past week or so, I think, you know,
Speaker 2: Paul Graham, who founded why Combinator, where Sam Moultman sort
Speaker 2: of made his name, said a quote that kind of
Speaker 2: rang out around everyone, and he said, you could parachute
Speaker 2: Sam into an island full of cannon, come back in
Speaker 2: five years, and Sam o wont would come out as king.
Speaker 2: And I think that's kind of the view of him
Speaker 2: in particular, and it does sum up, as you say,
Speaker 2: this culture of revering founders like life.
Speaker 1: I don't know actually how to interpret the idea that
Speaker 1: you're going to parachute him onto an island full of
Speaker 1: cannibals and it'll come out the winter, because that kild
Speaker 1: speak to actually just ambition and being extremely as they
Speaker 1: say in Silicon Valley, goal oriented as opposed necessarily having
Speaker 1: innovative genius, and I think, you know, ideally you want
Speaker 1: a combination of both if things are going to get done.
Speaker 3: But you know, if I can just jump in. It's
Speaker 3: interesting you mentioned Paul Graham, Dave, because Paul Graham, I think,
Speaker 3: is part of the reason why this mentality, this almost
Speaker 3: doctrine exists in Silicon Valley. When he started White Combinator,
Speaker 3: he was like a guru among startups, and his teaching,
Speaker 3: as it were, was that the founder is all that matters.
Speaker 2: In a way.
Speaker 3: The technology doesn't matter what a startups technology would it
Speaker 3: has under the hood. What matters is if the founder
Speaker 3: is a visionary hacker to hype who wants to build
Speaker 3: an empire, and if you, as an investor can find
Speaker 3: that kind of person, then you should give them free rein.
Speaker 3: The board should give them free rein, and they should
Speaker 3: be able to do whatever they need to do in
Speaker 3: order to build the empire. And that's why in most cases,
Speaker 3: someone like Mark Zuckerberg has majority voting share the board
Speaker 3: does whatever he wants pretty much, even through the most
Speaker 3: controversial times. Google's founders also had a lot of control
Speaker 3: of the company, outsized control, so I think a lot
Speaker 3: of it comes down to this kind of ideology that
Speaker 3: Paul kind of created and Sam perpetuated when he took
Speaker 3: over as y combinator head.
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs famously had Bill Campbell as a management coach,
Speaker 1: and Bill Campbell was sort of another one of these
Speaker 1: executives who in a different era was a guru to
Speaker 1: various Silicon Valley titans. But I sort of wonder if
Speaker 1: the Bill Campbell advice managerial advice in the Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: era was qualitatively different than the advice that Paul is
Speaker 1: giving a Sam Altman right now. Is that the case
Speaker 1: Parmi has there been an evolution and the kind of
Speaker 1: advice that nascent Silicon Valley titans are hearing from their advisors.
Speaker 3: I have to admit I'm not familiar with the advice
Speaker 3: that Steve Jobs got directly, but I think maybe there
Speaker 3: is a questioning more and more of whether these founder
Speaker 3: types should have all that control. That may still be
Speaker 3: the case at Facebook, but I mean, this is what
Speaker 3: made open ai so unique, right is that it had
Speaker 3: a board that didn't just have teeth, it actually used them,
Speaker 3: and it used them to fire him. So I don't
Speaker 3: know if that's necessarily changing, but it certainly was very,
Speaker 3: very different to open ai.
Speaker 1: Talk a little bit Parmi about Sam Altman's foundational experiences.
Speaker 1: Prior to coming to open ai. He had been an entrepreneur,
Speaker 1: a young computer with and then lands essentially at y
Speaker 1: Combinator and ends up running it. Yeah, or his bona
Speaker 1: fides before he came to open ai.
Speaker 3: Well, he paid his dues as a startup founder who
Speaker 3: created a failed startup, as so many startup founders do.
Speaker 3: He created a startup called looped, worked on it for
Speaker 3: a number of years, devoted his life to it, and
Speaker 3: then eventually sold it to another company, which you might
Speaker 3: say as a success, but in some ways it wasn't
Speaker 3: seen that way. And then he went on to become
Speaker 3: an advisor to Why Combinator, which is like basically one
Speaker 3: of the world's the world's most successful startup accelerator of
Speaker 3: all time. You've had companies like Reddit and Stripe and
Speaker 3: Airbnb all came through that, And you know, he became
Speaker 3: known for having this real ambitious view and pushing startups
Speaker 3: to be more ambitious. So he famously said to the
Speaker 3: founders of Airbnb, you should change the numbers in your
Speaker 3: pitch deck to investors from millions to billions, and then
Speaker 3: he kind of went into this stage where he got
Speaker 3: really into futuristic technology, and he was kind of gazing
Speaker 3: into the future with things like mind uploading and kind
Speaker 3: of uploading his consciousness into cloud computers and exploring the
Speaker 3: universe he's talked about up publicly. And he then started
Speaker 3: investing in very futuristic technology like nuclear fusion, life extension technology,
Speaker 3: and he pushed y Combinator in that direction, But his
Speaker 3: heart really was in AI when he had apparently he
Speaker 3: had this kind of realization at some point in his
Speaker 3: late twenties that humans aren't really all that unique and special,
Speaker 3: and our brains can be simulated by machines. And if
Speaker 3: that's the case, we can build a machine that is
Speaker 3: as unique and powerful as the human brain. And that's
Speaker 3: what he set out to do. But with this extra
Speaker 3: kind of level of idealism around spreading all the benefits
Speaker 3: of that to humanity.
Speaker 1: Well, we could go down so many roads here. This
Speaker 1: reminds me of the Silicon Valley chatter around the Singularity
Speaker 1: that the Google guys were so fascinated with. It's interesting
Speaker 1: to me that if you get enough technological success the
Speaker 1: next step in your thinking is how do you perpetuate
Speaker 1: yourself forever inside of a machine that Maybe that's a
Speaker 1: conversation for another day, Dave. You know, the idea of
Speaker 1: highly tailed motivated people being given free reign so they
Speaker 1: can be creative isn't limited to Silicon Valley. Obviously. There's
Speaker 1: a long history of it in the business world, you know,
Speaker 1: going back to the Rockefellers and Henry Ford and in
Speaker 1: completely different industries. And it's in the arts, right. We
Speaker 1: know that film directors and painters and others are sort
Speaker 1: of seen as masters or mistresses of their own destinies
Speaker 1: and people shouldn't intrude on that. Does all of that
Speaker 1: fairly accrue to Sam Altman in this case? Is he
Speaker 1: someone presiding over a company who needs a board to
Speaker 1: support him but not get in his way.
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's interesting, you know, thinking about Altman's upbringing,
Speaker 2: I guess through why combinates, because what that process did,
Speaker 2: I think is gained him a lot of allies and
Speaker 2: a reputation as being, you know, this real sort of
Speaker 2: network guy in tech, and I think that has allowed
Speaker 2: him to move into these future roles with a certain
Speaker 2: level of trust. I thought it was really remarkable. When
Speaker 2: we were hearing just about being fired, one of the
Speaker 2: people to immediately sort of go on to Twitter was
Speaker 2: Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, which was a Y
Speaker 2: Combinator company, immediately jumping to sam Untiner's defense and almost
Speaker 2: kind of reporting on the situation himself, which was bizarre.
Speaker 2: So I think, you know, although these founders do get
Speaker 2: this kind of reverence, it does have to be earned,
Speaker 2: and I think the way that Sam Oltman has earned
Speaker 2: that is not so much to be seen as this
Speaker 2: kind of visionary genius necessarily, but this kind of smart networker,
Speaker 2: this smart sort of bringing together of people. And the
Speaker 2: thing that made Y combinators stand out was this really
Speaker 2: fast acceleration. When companies would join y Combinator, they had
Speaker 2: to say a particular metric that they were going to grow,
Speaker 2: and every two weeks they'd checked that it was you know,
Speaker 2: two x four x and so forth. And I think
Speaker 2: that's the ethos that Sam Wontman has brought. Now the
Speaker 2: question is, you know, was that something that needs a
Speaker 2: board to rain in or is that something that a
Speaker 2: board needs to sort of sit back and say, okay,
Speaker 2: off you go and you know, I think sam Moultman
Speaker 2: must have been mindful of the reputation of founders, particularly
Speaker 2: people like Mark Zuckerberg, who you know, the board of
Speaker 2: Facebook could never fire Mark zuckerbo they don't have the
Speaker 2: power to do that. I think he was mindful of
Speaker 2: how that is seen, and I think he was trying
Speaker 2: to make a statement by saying that not only did
Speaker 2: he not have any financial stake in open ai, but
Speaker 2: he was serving as the behest of the boards. As
Speaker 2: it turned out, his reputation ended up being more influential
Speaker 2: than the votes of the board open AI. So even
Speaker 2: once they made that decision, the rallying and support around
Speaker 2: sam Oltman, thanks to his reputation within the tech industry
Speaker 2: built over the past several years, meant that was a
Speaker 2: bigger protection for him than having board votes would have
Speaker 2: been anyway.
Speaker 1: Did you want to jump in there, Permie, Yeah.
Speaker 3: And I think that's a great point about the amount
Speaker 3: of protection that he has. Silicon Valley is such a bubble,
Speaker 3: and if you're a founder, if you're successful and you've
Speaker 3: made a very valuable company, and you're very wealthy and
Speaker 3: you're a billionaire, that you have to behave so badly
Speaker 3: to fall from Silicon Valley's graces, and Elon Musk is
Speaker 3: a prime example of that. So I Meantman's return as
Speaker 3: CEO as a prime example of that. But I just
Speaker 3: wanted to go back to one point you mentioned, Tim.
Speaker 3: You were kind of casting our minds back to the
Speaker 3: Rockefellers and people in the arts who have this kind
Speaker 3: of power as founders and as leaders. But I really
Speaker 3: think that in this situation, someone like Sam Altman and
Speaker 3: the leaders of big tech companies are so different to
Speaker 3: any of that, just because of the scale and wealth
Speaker 3: and resources that these companies have, which are unprecedented in history.
Speaker 3: I mean, Google today reaches something like four billion users worldwide.
Speaker 3: That's half the global population. You know, although Chatgypt has
Speaker 3: something like two hundred million regular users. I think Microsoft services,
Speaker 3: which are going to use more and more open AI technology,
Speaker 3: touch more than a billion people around the world. So
Speaker 3: we're talking about a few people, these founders, with an
Speaker 3: incredible amount of free reign, who have like an incredible
Speaker 3: global influence at the same time, more so than any
Speaker 3: empire even in history.
Speaker 1: And now, of course, the product they have in hand
Speaker 1: is a revolutionary and transformative product. With Google, you know,
Speaker 1: in its pre AI phase, it was a ubiquitous search
Speaker 1: engine that sort of opened the world up to its users.
Speaker 1: No one really worried about it taking the world over.
Speaker 1: You know, it was an information provider. It could be
Speaker 1: a you know, assessed pool of disinformation too. And we'll
Speaker 1: get into this morning. I think our conversations, so I
Speaker 1: think this particular product AI and technology is shaping people's
Speaker 1: views in different ways as well. But Dave, tell me
Speaker 1: what you think.
Speaker 2: Well, I think is also worth stressing in terms of
Speaker 2: Oltman's value to open AI. You know, this is a
Speaker 2: company that people are talking about being valued at around
Speaker 2: eighty six billion dollars, and you know, a lot of
Speaker 2: this is because of the personality of Sam Oltman. The
Speaker 2: value of open II comes from the fact that for
Speaker 2: the past year, every week or so, it seemed like
Speaker 2: Sam Martman was shaking hands with a world leader. It
Speaker 2: was sitting there in front of Congress talking about AI,
Speaker 2: talking about regulation, and so there is value. There's clear
Speaker 2: value of what Sam Mortman is to open AYE. And
Speaker 2: I think it's reputation and the deal with Microsoft and
Speaker 2: the fact that it was and should still be positioned
Speaker 2: as the front runner here is down to the fact
Speaker 2: that he has this ability to communicate what the company
Speaker 2: wants to do clearly, and that doesn't necessarily come all
Speaker 2: that naturally to other people in Silicon Valley. So there
Speaker 2: is an intrinsic value in him himself well, and.
Speaker 1: You know, all of the Steve Jobs comparison, Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: was not an engineer. Steve Jobs wasn't an inventor of technology.
Speaker 1: That was Steve Wozniak, his early partner, and Jobs was
Speaker 1: the person who was capable of verticulating the kind of
Speaker 1: Nirvana vision of a laptop and every desk and then
Speaker 1: a mobile phone in every hand. And he was a
Speaker 1: good manager, and he was good at ultimately at sort
Speaker 1: of harnessing creative people, and that is a skill as well.
Speaker 1: But what still feels very mysterious to me, you guys,
Speaker 1: is why he got pushed out to begin with. Correct
Speaker 1: me on this if I'm not up to date, But
Speaker 1: at this point my understanding is the only kind of
Speaker 1: public reason that's been given for why the board pushed
Speaker 1: him out is that board, in their own words more
Speaker 1: or less, and I'm synopsizing, felt that he wasn't being
Speaker 1: candid with them in his communications with the board, and
Speaker 1: there is now I think an Altman commissioned investigation into
Speaker 1: what led up to that. It's being led by Larry
Speaker 1: Summers and some other board members, which also kind of
Speaker 1: speaks to whether or not that actually be an independent investigation.
Speaker 1: But anyway, how did we get here? Why did the
Speaker 1: board end up feeling concerned about this wonder kid in their.
Speaker 3: Miss Well, I think, first of all, no one still knows,
Speaker 3: apart from it seems the people on the board were,
Speaker 3: and possibly Sam because given a couple of his first
Speaker 3: public interviews, he will not answer questions about why he
Speaker 3: was fired. But I think the reason because it's all
Speaker 3: of speculation now, but it seems like the reason kind
Speaker 3: of goes back to what we were just discussing about
Speaker 3: the outsized influence and power of these tech founders. It
Speaker 3: goes unchecked in most cases, and from what people have
Speaker 3: been saying and reporting, the board uneasy essentially with Sam's
Speaker 3: behavior outside of open Ai and some of these ventures
Speaker 3: that he was pursuing. So for example, the iris scanning
Speaker 3: company world Coin, which aimed to scan the eyes of
Speaker 3: billions of people around the world in order to identify
Speaker 3: them when the Internet becomes flooded with bots, and also
Speaker 3: to help distribute the trillions of dollars of wealth that
Speaker 3: Altman believed would come about through the attainment of AGI.
Speaker 3: He was also pursuing, according to reports, creating a so
Speaker 3: called quote iPhone for AI with Johnny Ive who was
Speaker 3: the former lead designer at Apple. And he was also
Speaker 3: on top of that, reportedly talking to Middle Eastern sovereign
Speaker 3: wealth funds to raise something like ten billion dollars to
Speaker 3: build a chip company. This is a lot of fingers
Speaker 3: to have in different pies, and I think it sounds
Speaker 3: to me like the board was just overall kind of
Speaker 3: uneasy with where he was going with all these different
Speaker 3: ventures and whether he was going to use open AI's
Speaker 3: technology for any of that. So when they say he
Speaker 3: wasn't candid, it seems like they were kind of caught
Speaker 3: on the back foot with some of this stuff, and
Speaker 3: they didn't feel like they were performing their fiduciary duty
Speaker 3: to humanity, which was actually their mission as the board.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I want to get into some of this in
Speaker 1: more depth, you know, specifically this particular board's unusual mission.
Speaker 1: But one of the other things that's been out there, Dave,
Speaker 1: is it's been reported and then dismissed by others that
Speaker 1: there was this mysterious Project Q being hatched inside open
Speaker 1: AI that maybe ran a foul of this idea of
Speaker 1: AI being harnessed ultimately for the good. It's unclear to
Speaker 1: me but that the board had concerns about this product.
Speaker 1: Others have said, actually, there were no letters written about it.
Speaker 1: So the reporting has been very murky around this, and
Speaker 1: I don't know that we should rely on it, but
Speaker 1: it gets to this issue of the board being concerned about,
Speaker 1: you know, the idea of bots controlling the world and
Speaker 1: open an AI losing its mission along the way.
Speaker 2: Right right, I mean the ultimate endgame concern here is
Speaker 2: that an AIO created that poses a real risk to
Speaker 2: the human race, and any step along that journey makes
Speaker 2: people pretty pretty nervous. Now, the question around whether this
Speaker 2: was a factor in Oltmand's firing, as you say, that
Speaker 2: still mrk it at this point, and I think actually
Speaker 2: it sort of stresses this issue, which is that had
Speaker 2: the board that forced Oltman out, had it had reasoning
Speaker 2: and public explanations for why it did, that we could
Speaker 2: have avoided what's now going to be, you know, this
Speaker 2: endless filling of the void with possibly conspiracies of other
Speaker 2: you know, sort of hyperboles around what open ai is developing. Now.
Speaker 2: Q Star, this sort of rumored project that supposedly can
Speaker 2: solve basic math problems. I mean, for starters, calling it
Speaker 2: Q anything seems like a mistake. It's very bonred like,
Speaker 2: I mean, it's remarkable. And just days later we Amazon
Speaker 2: named one of it's a's Q as well, which I
Speaker 2: just find staggering that these companies would be so sort
Speaker 2: of mindless in doing that. But that's another that's another
Speaker 2: matter altogether.
Speaker 1: It's like naming something X well, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean you might as well call killer AI.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just going to make people sort of
Speaker 2: nervous or just conspiratorial, which you know, we have enough
Speaker 2: of that right now in the world, of course. But look,
Speaker 2: so the issue is, you know, it's very hard to
Speaker 2: sort of sometimes for people who aren't experts in AI
Speaker 2: to draw this line between something that might be able
Speaker 2: to do basic math and something that might destroy the universe.
Speaker 2: But supposedly there was some concern within open ai that
Speaker 2: this was you know, a significant break through, a significant step,
Speaker 2: and you know, speaking of x Elon Musk was in
Speaker 2: New York recently talking about the firing of Samultman, and
Speaker 2: he made what I thought was unusually lately a pretty
Speaker 2: reasonable point. He was saying, Look, either the board needs
Speaker 2: to be clear about these concerns and allow the public
Speaker 2: to know what they were, or if there wasn't a
Speaker 2: good reason, they need to you know, well they have
Speaker 2: stood down now because then you know they needed to
Speaker 2: be accountable for that error. But I think either way
Speaker 2: there needs to be a feeling of this vacuum around
Speaker 2: what exactly the concerns may have been. Because still one
Speaker 2: of the big unknowns in all this is, you know,
Speaker 2: one of open AI's co founders, Ilias skav who was
Speaker 2: the chief scientist open AI and was on the board,
Speaker 2: and he was the sort of pivotal changed mind on
Speaker 2: the board that meant the board had a majority to
Speaker 2: fire Altman. We don't quite know what it was that
Speaker 2: concerned him so much or why he changed his mind.
Speaker 2: I mean, he's subsequently come along and said he regretted
Speaker 2: the decision, and Sam Moultman, in part of his statement
Speaker 2: about returning to the company, Sam Moltman said that he
Speaker 2: harbors no ill will towards him, And you know, I've
Speaker 2: never heard that phrase said with much sincerity. So I'm
Speaker 2: kind of keen to see where he lives. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: mean it's like a football owner saying they backed the manager.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: It's sort of ominous sign that things might not be
Speaker 2: so well. And so this is one of these details
Speaker 2: that we need to sort of hear more about. And
Speaker 2: I think open AYE, if it wants to be at
Speaker 2: the front of talking to governments and being this hugely
Speaker 2: an entry company, the trade off has to be that
Speaker 2: it is more public, perhaps than tech companies would typically
Speaker 2: be in the past. It doesn't get to hide behind
Speaker 2: this super secrecy that Silicon Valley is more comfortable with.
Speaker 2: It has to tell us what was going on here.
Speaker 1: We should also know. And Elon Musk says he was
Speaker 1: an early board member at opmen AI along with Sam Altman.
Speaker 1: Before Sam became CEO, he was on the board and
Speaker 1: as Parmi noted earlier, Elon has run rough shot over
Speaker 1: his own board. We're going to take a break in
Speaker 1: a sec But this idea that AI is going to
Speaker 1: take over the world and that open AI is sitting
Speaker 1: on top of a Pandora's box, is that warranted. Parmi.
Speaker 3: First of all, I would say an answer to that
Speaker 3: question that I think open ai secretly loves that people
Speaker 3: think that because it makes their technology. However, but they
Speaker 3: keep it under wraps, it makes their technology seem that
Speaker 3: much more powerful. You know, for people to fear it
Speaker 3: doesn't mean they don't want to pay for it necessarily.
Speaker 3: Companies kind of see that almost as a kind of
Speaker 3: nice attractive feature to software. But I think I would
Speaker 3: say that with something like this new development with q starr,
Speaker 3: for example, that open ai is working on this ability
Speaker 3: to do great school math. You so this means that
Speaker 3: AI can reason, because when you do math, you have
Speaker 3: to figure out steps to solve a problem, and it's
Speaker 3: a little bit like solving problems in real life. And
Speaker 3: so right now, chatgybt is amazing because it can generate language,
Speaker 3: it can generate text, and a lot of that is
Speaker 3: just statistical based predictions. But if a model can do
Speaker 3: things much more strategically, if it can plan, if it
Speaker 3: can solve problems, many people say in the AI field
Speaker 3: that this is a step towards more general intelligence. And
Speaker 3: the reason why I'm saying that in response to your
Speaker 3: question is because although I don't think AGI is necessarily
Speaker 3: going to take over the world. I personally don't subscribe
Speaker 3: to the rogue AI theory, certainly not anytime soon. But
Speaker 3: this idea of humans outsourcing more than just tasks, but
Speaker 3: actual responsibility to AI is certainly going to be happening
Speaker 3: in the next couple of years with these kinds of
Speaker 3: developments like q Star, and also Google's new model called Gemini,
Speaker 3: which hasn't released yet, also has the sexpertise and strategic planning,
Speaker 3: so it's kind of similar to what open ai is
Speaker 3: working on, and I think that's going to be really
Speaker 3: interesting to see how business leaders, how anyone uses these
Speaker 3: kinds of systems not just to generate text or to
Speaker 3: ask advice, but to actually carry out some of our
Speaker 3: day to day work tasks and responsibilities.
Speaker 1: On that note, we're going to take a quick break
Speaker 1: to hear from a sponsor and then we'll come right back.
Speaker 1: We're back with parme Olsen and Dave Lee, and we're
Speaker 1: discussing all of the recent upheaval surrounding open ai and
Speaker 1: its impact on its product chat GPT. Dave sam Altman
Speaker 1: was the CEO and on the board at OpenAI. He's
Speaker 1: now just the CEO. How do we interpret that? Did
Speaker 1: he win the power struggle that ensued after he was
Speaker 1: forced out and brought back. Does he have more influence now?
Speaker 1: Does he as less influence? Can we even know?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean, look, I think a lot depends on
Speaker 2: a couple of things. I mean, one of them being
Speaker 2: how does the rest of this board look like in
Speaker 2: the coming weeks and months. You know, the interim board
Speaker 2: of three is going to expand possibly through as many
Speaker 2: as nine or they haven't quite confirmed the shape up
Speaker 2: of that, and there's going to be lots of sort
Speaker 2: of questions that's about what the makeup of that board's
Speaker 2: going to be. I mean, already the board has lost
Speaker 2: its only women. It's now an all male interim boards,
Speaker 2: So there's going to be pressure to reflect a diversity there.
Speaker 2: But then also there's going to have to be people
Speaker 2: who are incredibly versed in safety round AI, around policy
Speaker 2: and AI, people that are going to be at least
Speaker 2: seen as potentially being able to hold someone like Sam
Speaker 2: Altman to account or at least sort of reign in
Speaker 2: perhaps some of those commercial interests that might sort of
Speaker 2: provide conflicts or just kind of have him going full
Speaker 2: steam ahead. So I think it we'll know more about
Speaker 2: sam Altman's power. Once we know more about that board.
Speaker 1: Party you were mentioning earlier, how sam Alton was allowed
Speaker 1: to pursue all these other ventures outside of open Ai,
Speaker 1: including companies that possibly would have ended up as competitors
Speaker 1: getting funding for those rather than possibly getting funding for
Speaker 1: open Ai, just all of the myriad financial and professional conflicts.
Speaker 1: One of the other things that I find very strange
Speaker 1: in the story is that open ai is a nonprofit
Speaker 1: company housing a for profit subsidiary that offers a product
Speaker 1: Chat GPT for free unless you want extra Chat GPT features,
Speaker 1: and then as a consumer, you have to pay extra
Speaker 1: to get those. This confuses me, even in that structure
Speaker 1: at one point, the company at evaluation of about eighty
Speaker 1: six billion dollars, isn't this structure in it of itself
Speaker 1: bound to cause problems.
Speaker 3: One thing I underestimated about this whole story when it
Speaker 3: happened was how much power this board had, And I
Speaker 3: underestimated and didn't fully appreciate the fact that they really
Speaker 3: could fire sam Altman. But the idea of trying to
Speaker 3: combine for profit the nonprofit is not completely unusual In
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley. Mozilla is connected with the Mozilla Foundation that
Speaker 3: is a nonprofit, Signal, which is the encrypted messaging app
Speaker 3: that is also a nonprofit, and even just recently, two
Speaker 3: of the leading AI firms in Silicon Valley. One is
Speaker 3: called Inflection, the other one is Anthropic, the latter of
Speaker 3: which split away from open Ai a couple of years ago.
Speaker 3: Those are also trying to thread this needle between being
Speaker 3: businesses that make money but also building AI that is
Speaker 3: safe and beneficial to humanity, and so they are also
Speaker 3: tinkering with these kind of unusual corporate structures, like being
Speaker 3: a public benefit corporation. I think in the case of Inflection,
Speaker 3: they're structured in such a way where they have to
Speaker 3: prioritize the environment and consumers on the exact same level
Speaker 3: as their investors. So profit is not the number one
Speaker 3: priority for them. It has to be upheld with these
Speaker 3: other things now, and this is clearly very difficult to
Speaker 3: pull off open Ai. It doesn't seem to have worked
Speaker 3: for them. Deep Mind, which is the big AI lab
Speaker 3: that's part of Google, also tried to do this. They
Speaker 3: tried to spin out of Google for several years. They
Speaker 3: tried to create a governance structure called a Global Interest Company.
Speaker 3: They wanted to be like a nonprofit style company. It
Speaker 3: totally failed. Google next it. So there's this history of
Speaker 3: AI builders trying to do this because they know this
Speaker 3: technology is so transformative and they don't necessarily feel comfortable
Speaker 3: even with it being controlled by monopolistic corporations essentially, but
Speaker 3: it's been very difficult to figure out how to make
Speaker 3: it work.
Speaker 2: I think I was sop on. Isn't it the case
Speaker 2: that this model of a nonprofit running a technology product,
Speaker 2: it comes under a lot more strain given the sheer
Speaker 2: amounts of money necessary to pull it off. With aim
Speaker 2: absolutely eating power Microsoft place. I think it was up
Speaker 2: to thirteen billion dollars to have open ai use its
Speaker 2: servers to do the crunching that makes AI possible. So,
Speaker 2: you know, Mozilla is a great example there of an
Speaker 2: organization that runs a browser, but creating and running a
Speaker 2: browser isn't in the same league as having to build
Speaker 2: cutting edge AI. And even in the case of Mozilla,
Speaker 2: you know, much of their funding comes from companies like
Speaker 2: Google and others. So it's always been a bit uneasy
Speaker 2: this tech model with nonprofits, and it's been particularly strained
Speaker 2: when it comes to AI just because of the magnitude
Speaker 2: of what needs to be done well.
Speaker 1: And you also have, you know, a chief executive whose
Speaker 1: mission is to grow the company and increase profitability and
Speaker 1: expand the share of the product that's selling. And then
Speaker 1: a board which is invested with responsibilities for helping to
Speaker 1: achieve that, but also being kind of a self regulatory
Speaker 1: device that is trying to stand in the way of abuses.
Speaker 1: All of it, Parmi was saying, And you know, I
Speaker 1: think this is the historical tension anyway between boards and executives.
Speaker 1: It happens in lots of industries. Boards came into being
Speaker 1: to sort of make sure, especially publicly traded companies, that
Speaker 1: investors interests were being looked after and that you didn't
Speaker 1: have rogue CEOs. And there's a lot of situations even
Speaker 1: outside of tech, where you can have a rogue CEO.
Speaker 1: But of course, and again, as Party mentioned earlier, we're
Speaker 1: talking about a product and a technology at play here
Speaker 1: that scares people. You know, the board, Parmi continues to
Speaker 1: interest me because, as you've noted in one of your columns,
Speaker 1: open Ai had a chance to get more women on
Speaker 1: its board and it just drove right past that, which
Speaker 1: now has an all male board. One of the people
Speaker 1: on the board that was reconstituted, Helen Turner, interested me
Speaker 1: because Helen Toner is an academic. She has done a
Speaker 1: lot of work herself on AI and the uses of technology,
Speaker 1: and it has been reported that she had worked on
Speaker 1: a paper that raised some questions about even whether or
Speaker 1: not open AI's own products could be problematic, and that
Speaker 1: Sam Altman confronted her about that and they had a dispute.
Speaker 1: She was a pivotal person in his departure based on
Speaker 1: the report we've seen. Tell me about those two things,
Speaker 1: about the fact that we have an all male board
Speaker 1: there now and what happened to Helen Toner.
Speaker 3: Well, I'll start with Toner, and absolutely right. She did
Speaker 3: write that research paper. You can see it. It's public
Speaker 3: and has written in association with Georgetown University, and she's
Speaker 3: scathing about open Ai. She referred to frantic corner cutting
Speaker 3: in the progress of building chat Ept, and then she
Speaker 3: compared open Ai with its rival Anthropic and said that Anthropic,
Speaker 3: which was the group of people at open Ai that
Speaker 3: broke away to make Safer AI, had done a better
Speaker 3: job of more slowly deploying a product, making sure that
Speaker 3: it was safe before they put it out into the wild,
Speaker 3: and sam Altmand apparently was livid about that. Didn't like
Speaker 3: the fact that she was putting that into the public
Speaker 3: domain when you know the open ai is being investigated
Speaker 3: by the Federal Trade Commission for potentially infringing on people's privacy.
Speaker 3: He told her, according to reports, that it was compromising
Speaker 3: the company, and so, yes, there was a lot of
Speaker 3: tension there, but I think tim, I mean, you could
Speaker 3: look at it both ways. Yes, what she was doing
Speaker 3: was compromising open AI's reputation, but she was an academic.
Speaker 3: They knew that when they brought her on the board.
Speaker 3: And as you also mentioned, this is kind of what
Speaker 3: boards are supposed to do, push back a little bit,
Speaker 3: and boards typically have a fiduciary duty to shareholders. This
Speaker 3: was not the case with open Ai. The board had
Speaker 3: a fiduciary duty to the open ai mission to benefit humanity.
Speaker 3: It's kind of, if you think about it, quite a
Speaker 3: bizarre phrase. Feels weird saying that, but that is literally
Speaker 3: how it was written and signed and agreed by everyone.
Speaker 3: But Toner was the one that lost her seat, and
Speaker 3: so was Tasha McCauley.
Speaker 1: It's smacks of Sir Gey Brand and Larry Page do
Speaker 1: no harm in their early Google literation.
Speaker 3: Absolutely yeah. And Google also famously said in the very beginning,
Speaker 3: we don't want advertising, we hate advertising. And now they're
Speaker 3: the world's biggest ad giant.
Speaker 1: So there you go, Ah, the children, but we need
Speaker 1: them among us. Whatever the merits are of how the
Speaker 1: board intervened here, and I have sympathy for a lot
Speaker 1: of them, it also had quite the clown show aspects
Speaker 1: to the whole thing. You sort of wondered why this
Speaker 1: could have been choreographed or sorted in a more private way,
Speaker 1: but maybe that was impossible. Here is there another way
Speaker 1: this could have played out at open AI?
Speaker 2: I mean yes, And the way it could have played
Speaker 2: out was the phrase that was bringing your receipts. If
Speaker 2: the board had this feeling that there was issues with
Speaker 2: how Sam Wontman had been communicating with them, it needed examples.
Speaker 2: It needed a way to sort of explain its thinking
Speaker 2: in a way it just hasn't done. It kind of
Speaker 2: reminds me of when you have a sort of argument
Speaker 2: with a spouse and you kind of well, give me
Speaker 2: one example, and you go, well, I can't think of
Speaker 2: one right now, but you never quite get anywhere, do you,
Speaker 2: And nobody gives any concession on either side, and that's
Speaker 2: kind of where we're at with Open AI. It was
Speaker 2: being described as a coup, and I think that's kind
Speaker 2: of accurate, and that there was a sort of swing
Speaker 2: for the king and you've got to have everything in
Speaker 2: a row and if you swing, you better not miss,
Speaker 2: and that's what they did. They swung and they and
Speaker 2: they missed because they didn't have the reason to back
Speaker 2: it up. And you know, as we've now discovered as well,
Speaker 2: they were fighting the forces of the commercial interest and
Speaker 2: open AI, so you could argue they perhaps never stood
Speaker 2: a chance. But I spoke to one the business professor
Speaker 2: recently who made the point that talking about this sort
Speaker 2: of nonprofit management and so forth, we shouldn't necessarily write
Speaker 2: off this model because what this could have just been
Speaker 2: was in competency in this board in particular when it
Speaker 2: came to carrying out this coup or whatever we want
Speaker 2: to describe it.
Speaker 3: I completely agree with that, and I think that's what's
Speaker 3: such a shame about the whole thing, because it does
Speaker 3: sound like they did come across as quite incompetent, and
Speaker 3: if you look at them they didn't have a lot
Speaker 3: of experience on other boards. So if they had just
Speaker 3: executed it a little bit more professionally, then I think
Speaker 3: people could maybe consider this kind of model as potentially working.
Speaker 3: It's not a terrible model. I mean the idea behind
Speaker 3: it is quite noble when you think about it. It
Speaker 3: just couldn't work.
Speaker 2: There's the thing, you know, talking about the paper from
Speaker 2: Helen Toner. I mean, I think it's worth remembering that
Speaker 2: that paper, like you say, it was written, it was
Speaker 2: public and Helen Tona was still on the border Open AI.
Speaker 2: So that was an indication that that dynamic did work right.
Speaker 2: I mean, it created tension, but ultimately the governance was
Speaker 2: still in place. It was just this sort of follow
Speaker 2: up move that caused all this chaos.
Speaker 1: Let's take another quick break, my friends, and then we'll
Speaker 1: come right back and get into our last act here. Today,
Speaker 1: we're back and we're chatting about Sam Altman, Open Ai, chat,
Speaker 1: GPT and the AI Revolution with Parmie Olsen and Dave
Speaker 1: Lee David. It's not clear to me that open AI's
Speaker 1: management problems are solved and they're not operating in a
Speaker 1: protected market as it were. They have a head start
Speaker 1: they have a product that is early out of the
Speaker 1: gates and much beloved, but they have to deal with
Speaker 1: a lot of competitors who are in this market too,
Speaker 1: And do you think that their management problems are in
Speaker 1: rain enough that this episode won't affect their longevity.
Speaker 2: Well, it's interesting. I was the other night and they
Speaker 2: just happened to be a fairly senior person open aiye there,
Speaker 2: and they said to me, you know that prior week
Speaker 2: when all this was up in the air, Yes, it
Speaker 2: was disruptive. They didn't know whether they were going to
Speaker 2: be working for Microsoft in a week or any of
Speaker 2: these other sort of different outcomes that we could have seen.
Speaker 2: But as of sort of Monday and Tuesday, the week after,
Speaker 2: things were basically back to normal and people were coding again,
Speaker 2: people were planning again, and it's almost as if nothing
Speaker 2: is that had ever happened. Now, of course, a big
Speaker 2: thing had happened, and we've yet to see how that
Speaker 2: fully shakes out. But I think given where they were
Speaker 2: at on that Friday evening when this announcement was made
Speaker 2: and the weekend of complete madness, I actually think it's
Speaker 2: been a pretty impressive sort of pulling back into just
Speaker 2: sort of normality, So we'll see whether that has any
Speaker 2: long standing impact. I think you know those other companies,
Speaker 2: Google in particular, part Me mentioned Gemini earlier one of
Speaker 2: their AI projects that's delayed for various reasons. So a
Speaker 2: company like Google's probably thinking, oh, wouldn't it be good
Speaker 2: if open Eye was slowed down a little bit because
Speaker 2: we could do with catching up here. So I think
Speaker 2: competitors were mildly delighted to see that, But I still
Speaker 2: think open eye is going to be considered to be
Speaker 2: the leader here still, and that perhaps wouldn't have been
Speaker 2: the case had they successfully asked sam Oltman Harmy.
Speaker 1: It's been almost exactly a year since chatchept was released publicly.
Speaker 1: What has open ai done since then to protect and
Speaker 1: expand its franchise. I think chatchipt can accept more queries.
Speaker 1: It's not only techt base. Its database is more up
Speaker 1: to date. But as you've noted, also, mistakes have bound
Speaker 1: still when you use the product. So how do you
Speaker 1: see the evolution of the company over the last year?
Speaker 3: Oh, over the last year? I think really the success
Speaker 3: of Chatchipt, first of all, took them by surprise. They
Speaker 3: were taking bets internally about how many people would use
Speaker 3: it within the first week, and the top bet was
Speaker 3: one hundred thousand users and it ended up being more
Speaker 3: like a million. So I think, really the past year
Speaker 3: has just been open ai scrambling to keep up with
Speaker 3: viral success that it absolutely did not anticipate. Having said that,
Speaker 3: it has from a business perspective, done incredibly well to
Speaker 3: keep up with and satisfy the demand for people who
Speaker 3: want to use this, whether you're a consumer who wants
Speaker 3: to spend twenty dollars a month on chat GPT plus,
Speaker 3: or a company who wants to get access to open
Speaker 3: AI's software and technology, or a company that wants to
Speaker 3: access it through Microsoft. And I think that's really where
Speaker 3: open ai has real stability is through that partnership with Microsoft.
Speaker 3: Because the thing about Microsoft is that it's big product
Speaker 3: through which it dispenses open AI's technology is cloud. It's
Speaker 3: known as the Azure platform, and it has something like
Speaker 3: eighteen thousand customers and their big names, you know, like Rolls, Royce, Adobe,
Speaker 3: the Seattle Seahawks, just all sorts of random big companies,
Speaker 3: And the great thing for Microsoft is that these customers
Speaker 3: are locked in to this product because it's actually really
Speaker 3: expensive to extricate all your systems from what one cloud
Speaker 3: provider like Microsoft and move on to another cloud provider
Speaker 3: like Amazon. The customers and IT professionals hate this. They
Speaker 3: really don't like the fact that they can't shop around.
Speaker 3: But this is really good for Microsoft and also very
Speaker 3: very good for open Ai. So this past year kind
Speaker 3: of integrating themselves more and more and serving their top investor, Microsoft,
Speaker 3: who owns forty nine percent of open Ai, has really
Speaker 3: stood them in good stead, and it certainly did over
Speaker 3: this past weekend because part of me wonders would Altman
Speaker 3: have been able to be reinstated if he didn't have
Speaker 3: such an Adella pushing so hard for.
Speaker 1: Him well, and that brings us, Dave to the question
Speaker 1: I wanted to ask you about Microsoft. Given that Sacha Nadella,
Speaker 1: Microsoft's CEO, was very enmeshed in the open Ai upheaval,
Speaker 1: he almost got Sam Altman and many of his employees
Speaker 1: for a song. It probably would have been one of
Speaker 1: the most epic, sort of cheap takeovers in corporate history
Speaker 1: if that had panned out. Nadella has referred to Microsoft
Speaker 1: as being the co pilot company now, like the company
Speaker 1: that makes products that sort of assist you in having
Speaker 1: a better corporate liver a better personal life. And obviously
Speaker 1: chat GPT fits right into that. Microsoft is a player here,
Speaker 1: and it's a heavily influential player both in this drama
Speaker 1: and where I think open ai is going to go correct.
Speaker 2: Yes, I mean it's not just a players, you know,
Speaker 2: as the player externally. I mean there are other investors
Speaker 2: in open ai, but it's only Microsoft that really has
Speaker 2: the power here. I think, you know, Palme was touching
Speaker 2: on a really important point there, and one that I
Speaker 2: think's worth remembering is that the winner in AI isn't
Speaker 2: necessarily going to be the company that has the best
Speaker 2: AI or at least the most sophisticated AI. It's going
Speaker 2: to be the company that can put that AI into
Speaker 2: applications that consumers are either already using or that they
Speaker 2: want to use in future. And so when you have
Speaker 2: Microsoft on board, that is incredibly powerful. Because people have
Speaker 2: been using Word for years, people have been frustrated at
Speaker 2: PowerPoint for years, Excel, you know all these things that
Speaker 2: people do, you know, Search changes, and people laugh about
Speaker 2: Microsoft and Clippy, the little the little mascot that used
Speaker 2: to have and that sense you you know where we
Speaker 2: sort of heading again forgotten all about Clipping. I love
Speaker 2: Clip was he was underrated. But this is where we're
Speaker 2: going again. And I think that's why this deal is
Speaker 2: so valuable to both open I and to Microsoft, and
Speaker 2: it's why Satching Thedella leapt to action to step in
Speaker 2: to stop his investment in ape and ai going up
Speaker 2: in flames. That when Microsoft said, you know, we will
Speaker 2: take on and we will salary match as many open
Speaker 2: ai employees are interesting in joining us. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: a huge thing that was still I saw one estimate
Speaker 2: that was going to cost around a billion dollars to
Speaker 2: do that. Now that's arguably getting a eighty billion dollar
Speaker 2: company a huge sort of black fried a deal. But
Speaker 2: that's a huge amount to add to your Headcunt. They
Speaker 2: weren't even sure where they were going to put them.
Speaker 2: They were clearing out desks at an old office that
Speaker 2: used to be used for LinkedIn, which one of the
Speaker 2: companies that Microsoft owns, and so this would have all
Speaker 2: been very very very very difficult for Microsoft. What they've
Speaker 2: come to instead, I think is their sort of preferred option.
Speaker 2: Sam Oltman back in the job, and also on this
Speaker 2: new board that's being made up. They have an observer seat,
Speaker 2: so they can't vote, can't have a say in the decisions,
Speaker 2: but can observe the board now, I asked, at the
Speaker 2: time we're recording this, we're still learning about what exactly
Speaker 2: that means. I asked Microsoft. They weren't sharing any more
Speaker 2: about what exactly they'd be able to observe and what
Speaker 2: imput they could have or indeed who at Microsoft might
Speaker 2: take that position. But Microsoft has gone from a situation
Speaker 2: where it had a sort of very much outsider perspective
Speaker 2: on open Ai, even though it invested more than ten
Speaker 2: billion dollars, to having a situation now where it's got
Speaker 2: a much closer relationship and we'll get a heads up
Speaker 2: on any crazy decisions like this future. One of the
Speaker 2: things that was gobsmacking about how the Sam Altman firing
Speaker 2: went down was that Microsoft learned just about the same
Speaker 2: time I did when the blog post went up. There
Speaker 2: it is, and that given the reliance that Microsoft has
Speaker 2: on open Ai and its importance to Microsoft's strategy.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a major investorable thing.
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely, and typically your huge investors, part of that
Speaker 2: investment would mean getting a board seat, getting two board
Speaker 2: seats maybe, but such as the popularity of open ai
Speaker 2: and also were stressing. Is one of the reasons why
Speaker 2: Microsoft was something of an outside is because it worried
Speaker 2: that being too close to OpenAI would raise some level
Speaker 2: of scrutiny from competition regulators, sort of wondering, you know,
Speaker 2: it is Microsoft going to flex its power to stop
Speaker 2: others getting access to good AI. So there's a lot
Speaker 2: of factors at play, but in sure, I think Microsoft
Speaker 2: has found a scenario that suits it very very nicely.
Speaker 3: Indeed, Yeah, And I would just add that if it
Speaker 3: had been a subsidiary of Microsoft, if Sam Altman had
Speaker 3: been part of this advanced AI group, that's not what
Speaker 3: Inodella wanted at all, because that would mean Microsoft takes
Speaker 3: on all of the reputational risk, all of the legal
Speaker 3: risk for all the crazy stuff that open ai regularly does,
Speaker 3: like putting chatchypt out into the world. Microsoft would never
Speaker 3: do that because copywriter issues for a start, and crazy
Speaker 3: things that this bot could say. That's why big tech
Speaker 3: companies don't do the kinds of things that open ai does.
Speaker 3: So it's much better to be an investor take on
Speaker 3: all the glow of open ai and none of the liability.
Speaker 2: Which saw a sign off that didn't we part me
Speaker 2: a few years ago, which I'm sure you remember, when
Speaker 2: Microsoft had an AI bot that it kind of released
Speaker 2: onto Twitter. I believe it was called Tay the Box. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and almost immediately people realized that if they said certain
Speaker 2: things to it, it would repeat them back to them,
Speaker 2: and it became sweary, it became racist, and it was
Speaker 2: just this is just a tiny, tiny experiment, but it
Speaker 2: caused Microsoft no end of reputational issues and things to
Speaker 2: be accountable for. So you can totally see why they
Speaker 2: want to be outside to some degree.
Speaker 3: Saw people still cringe at that memory.
Speaker 1: And I think Microsoft still licking its federal antitrust investigation
Speaker 1: wounds of the nineteen nineties. That makes it a little
Speaker 1: as as I put it earlier, absolutely has it meant
Speaker 1: to appear to be the titan in this nascent.
Speaker 3: And then these who were dealing with that in the nineties,
Speaker 3: like Brad Smith the Legal Council are still there, like
Speaker 3: they all remember this stuff. So yeah, and satchin Adella two, I.
Speaker 1: Want to ask you each about lessons that you've learned
Speaker 1: from this dramatic little moment in Silicon Valley. I like
Speaker 1: to ask people that at the end of the show.
Speaker 1: So let's start with you, Parmie. What is something you've
Speaker 1: learned watching this recent debacle that you didn't know before
Speaker 1: it happened.
Speaker 3: Hmmm, it's a good question. I guess I would just
Speaker 3: go back to my answer previously about the fact that
Speaker 3: a board like this could actually topple someone like Sam Altman.
Speaker 3: But I suppose the other thing is that this isn't
Speaker 3: so much something that I've learned, but just a suspicion.
Speaker 3: The cynic me has been confirmed that Silicon Valley will
Speaker 3: Silicon Valley, And even if you set up a board
Speaker 3: and a governance structure that looks good to everyone, that
Speaker 3: looks like it's there to help humanity, it will still
Speaker 3: ultimately serve the purpose of its investors. And that is
Speaker 3: precisely what happened after this dramatic weekend where Sam was
Speaker 3: ousted and brought right back in. So a little bit
Speaker 3: of hypocrisy there, and also just Silicon Valley being Silicon Valley.
Speaker 1: Dave, I don't know, can you still learn things? Both
Speaker 1: of you know so much that I sometimes wonder.
Speaker 2: Learning every day I've learned Listeners to parme me on
Speaker 2: this podcast and I'm glad you let her go first.
Speaker 2: I can have a moment to think about this, because
Speaker 2: it's interesting because on some levels it feels utterly predictable
Speaker 2: this happened. And I think one thing I've learned or
Speaker 2: was surprised by, was I think we always knew that
Speaker 2: at some point there would be some friction around the
Speaker 2: direction of one of these companies. I'm surprised it's come
Speaker 2: so soon for open ai I thought we'd be more
Speaker 2: sort of tangible threats or fall out or crisis that
Speaker 2: we'd all sort of know about that would lead to
Speaker 2: a moment like this. I'm surprised it's come sort of
Speaker 2: from what seems to be more just sort of human
Speaker 2: personality clashes than anything else. So that surprised me. The
Speaker 2: frigidity is surprising. But I think that the lesson, if
Speaker 2: we can take one so far, and I think it's yeah,
Speaker 2: we're still learning the lessons. I think the lesson is
Speaker 2: that open aiy is a tech company. It's a tech
Speaker 2: company like Facebook, to tech company like Google's the tech company.
Speaker 2: And I think I'm going to constantly remind myself of
Speaker 2: this sort of this week and remember that ultimately it
Speaker 2: was the needs of the tech industry and the money
Speaker 2: of the tech industry that essentially had the final say.
Speaker 2: And so I think open AI. Although we can talk
Speaker 2: about governance and nonprofit status, I think ultimately it's still
Speaker 2: a tech company and we should cover it as such
Speaker 2: and think about it as such. So that's my lesson
Speaker 2: from this.
Speaker 1: I think we are out of time. Prime and Dave,
Speaker 1: thank you so much for coming on today.
Speaker 3: Thank you.
Speaker 2: Thanks.
Speaker 1: Tim parme Olsen and Dave Lee are both columnists with
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Opinion. You can find their work on the Bloomberg
Speaker 1: Opinion website and on the Bloomberg terminal. Here at crash Course,
Speaker 1: we believe that collisions can be messy, impressive, challenging, surprising,
Speaker 1: and always instructive. In today's crash Course, I learned that
Speaker 1: no matter how talented or how smart you are, no
Speaker 1: matter what industry you're working in, even if it's in
Speaker 1: Silicon Valley, humans can be humans and they can do crazy,
Speaker 1: crazy things. What did you learn? We'd love to hear
Speaker 1: from you. You can tweet at the Bloomberg Opinion handle
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Speaker 1: and me. Our supervising producer is Magnus Hendrickson, and we
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Speaker 1: I'm Tim O'Brien. We'll be back next week with another
Speaker 1: crash course