Extremely sudden! Just now, OpenAI, the world’s leading artificial intelligence company, has experienced a personnel crisis, and OpenAI CEO Ultraman, the “father of ChatGPT”, has been eliminated. Just less than two weeks ago, OpenAI held its first developer conference. Ultraman announced a series of OpenAI product updates to global developers and ChatGPT users.
On November 17, OpenAI issued a press release on its official website stating that the company’s board of directors announced that Altman would resign as CEO and leave the company, and that Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati would serve as interim CEO, effective immediately.
After being ousted, Altman posted on the Yes, I love working with such talented people. More to say about what’s next later.”
Image source: Twitter
OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman will also step down as chairman of the board but will continue to serve in the company. Brockman wrote on Twitter that he and Altman were shocked and saddened by what the board did today. last night,ultramanReceived a text message from Ilya (Chief Scientist of OpenAI) asking to talk at noon on Friday. Ilya toldultramanHe was to be fired, and word quickly spread. At 12:23 on Friday, Ilya sent a Google Meet link and Greg was informed that he would be removed from the board and that Sam had been fired. He said there was an outpouring of support, “but please don’t spend any time worrying. We’re going to be fine.”Greater things are coming“. It is worth noting that Altman retweeted Brockman’s tweet.
As an important shareholder of the company, Microsoft issued a statement this morning saying that the company has a long-term cooperative relationship with OpenAI and abides by its investment commitment to OpenAI. It is reported that OpenAI plans to obtain further financial support from its largest investor, Microsoft, to advance the vision of AGI and create a computer software that is “as intelligent as humans” (general artificial intelligence AGI).
Microsoft invested US$10 billion in OpenAI’s open artificial intelligence earlier this year, and the related agreement valued OpenAI at US$29 billion. Recently, OpenAI is negotiating to sell existing employee shares at a valuation of US$86 billion, and the valuation has soared during the year.
According to the agreement, Microsoft will exchange approximately 49% of OpenAI’s shares, and Microsoft is entitled to 75% of the profits until it recovers its investment of US$13 billion, after which the share ratio will gradually decrease; after the profit reaches US$92 billion, Microsoft’s share ratio will reach 49%; After profits reach 150 billion US dollars, OpenAI investors will donate their shares to the OpenAI Foundation for free and completely transform into a non-profit organization.
Ultraman and Musk arrive at the same destination by different routes
In fact, the ownership structure of OpenAI is very “weird”. Altman does not have any equity in OpenAI, let alone the control rights that founders like Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have. Altman has always said that the company does not Will be “IPO listed”. Therefore, many people have speculated that Ultraman may be fired at any time.
OpenAI was founded in 2015 and was initiated by Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Altman, Brockman and others to promote the development of artificial intelligence technology.
In November last year, OpenAI released the chatbot ChatGPT, which set off a new round of artificial intelligence craze around the world with its powerful natural language understanding and generation capabilities. And it has quickly penetrated various industries and the general public, becoming the most influential artificial intelligence company in the world.
When it was founded, OpenAI stated that the company was a non-profit artificial intelligence research company and announced that the company’s mission was to “ensure that general artificial intelligence benefits all mankind.”
In 2019, the company underwent a major transformation from a nonprofit to a “caped-profit” company, a hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit where shareholders’ return on investment is limited to no more than their original investment. 100 times the amount. OpenAI’s transformation also prompted Musk to leave.
After Microsoft announced its investment this year, especially after ChatGPT became popular, Musk criticized it many times, saying, “OpenAI was created as an open source non-profit company (that’s why I named it “Open” AI), but Now it has become a closed-source, profit-maximizing company controlled by Microsoft.”
In March of this year, he tweeted again, “I’m still confused how a non-profit organization to which I donated nearly $100 million became a for-profit organization with a market value of $30 billion? If this is legal, why Doesn’t everyone do this?”
Now, Musk seems to have hit the nail on the head. “OpenAI is controlled by capital” has become a reality, which is similar to the early years when Steve Jobs was expelled from Apple’s board of directors. Market rumors say that this will clear the way for Microsoft to fully acquire OpenAI.
It is worth noting that as soon as the news of Altman’s resignation came out, Musk’s social platform “X” released a “job application link” through its official account, with the sentence “in case anyone needs it”, which seemed to be a response to the resignation. Altman offered an olive branch.
Image source: Twitter
ChatGPT just suffered a serious outage
On November 6, local time, at OpenAI’s first developer conference, Ultraman announced a series of OpenAI product updates to global developers and ChatGPT users, including the rapid creation of GPTs customized for ChatGPT, enabling everyone to have large models; introducing The GPT-4 Turbo model with stronger performance directly supports 128k context, which is equivalent to reading 300 pages of books at a time. The knowledge base has been updated to April this year; and the GPT Store application store and new Assistants for AI agents will be launched soon. API etc.
OpenAI also revealed at the press conference that since ChatGPT was officially released, the number of weekly active users has exceeded 100 million; currently more than 2 million developers and customers are developing on the company’s API; 92% of the world’s Fortune 500 companies of companies are using its products; ChatGPT Enterprise Edition customers include PricewaterhouseCoopers, shopify, etc.
However, 24 hours later, the ChatGPT website was “crowded”.
Starting at 21:54 on November 8, Beijing time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and API (application programming interfaces provided for developers to build third-party services) were all unavailable, and the entire failure lasted for more than 12 hours. OpenAI said that this was a “Major Outage” event.
In response, Altman issued a public apology. He said that the usage of the new features of devday (developer conference) far exceeded expectations. The company originally planned to enable GPTs for all paying subscribers on Monday, but it still failed to materialize. Due to load reasons, service instability may occur in the short term.
On the morning of November 15, Ultraman announced on social platforms that he would temporarily register a new ChatGPT Plus account.
“Father of ChatGPT”
Sam Altman is an influential entrepreneur and investor in the field of artificial intelligence. He grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, and developed a passion for computer science from an early age. At age 8, he learned how to program and take apart computers.
He admitted his homosexuality to his parents at the age of 16. A few years later, he was accepted into Stanford University to study computer science. While in college, he dropped out with two classmates to develop their first mobile app, Loopt, an app that shared a user’s location with friends.
Loopt later became one of the first eight companies to be funded by Y Combinator, which gives each founder $6,000 in investment per startup. However, Altman’s interest in Loopt didn’t last forever, so he sold it to banking company Green Dot in 2012 for $43 million.
Altman later founded a venture fund called Hydrazine Capital and raised $21 million. He has invested in multiple Y Combinator companies and taught a lecture series at Stanford University in the fall of 2014 called “How to Start a Startup.”
In 2014, Altman was selected by Y Combinator founder Paul Graham to succeed him as Y Combinator president. In this role, he actively promotes Y Combinator, providing funding and guidance to many startups.
In 2015, Altman founded OpenAI with Tesla CEO Musk and others, with the goal of ensuring that artificial intelligence does not wipe out humanity. LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and well-known investor Peter Thiel pledged to invest US$1 billion.
In 2018, Musk announced his withdrawal from OpenAI, and Altman resigned as YC president in March 2019 to focus on OpenAI. He continued to serve as YC chairman.
In 2019, the company underwent a major transformation from a nonprofit to a “caped-profit” company, a hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit where shareholders’ return on investment is limited to no more than their original investment. 100 times the amount, when OpenAI accepted a US$1 billion investment from Microsoft.
However, Ultraman does not hold many shares in OpenAI, which has also led to its current passive situation.
Different from the worries of many industry leaders about artificial intelligence, at the just-concluded APEC panel discussion, Ultraman made a shocking statement and emphasized that as a species, humans are now on the road to self-destruction, and artificial intelligence may be A means to prevent humanity from destroying itself.
Although Ultraman has stated his position in public many times before, AI has evolved its unexplainable reasoning capabilities, and he also admitted that artificial intelligence “has a certain possibility” of killing humans. But at this meeting, he focused on elaborating on his latest understanding: compared to threats, the importance of AI technology to human beings. If we want to thrive for tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or even billions of years, we need technology.
Where does the new CEO come from?
It is understood that Mira Murati is 34 years old and was born in Albania. When she was 16 years old, she received a scholarship to attend an international school in Vancouver, Canada. Later, Murati graduated from the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Dartmouth College in the United States.
After graduation, she started interning at Goldman Sachs and later joined the French aerospace company Zodiac Aerospace as a senior concept engineer. In 2013, she joined Tesla and served as an engineer and product manager, especially making important contributions in the development of Tesla Model X.
In 2018, Murati joined OpenAI as Vice President of Applied AI and Partnerships and was promoted to CTO; during this time, she helped launch AI products such as ChatGPT, DALL-E, and GPT-4, and worked closely with teams at Microsoft , integrating their technology into Microsoft’s existing products, known as the “Mother of ChatGPT”.
It is worth noting that Mira Murati is still certified as OpenAI CTO on social media and has not made a public statement on this. His latest speech was on November 7, when the developer conference showed GPT-4 Turbo.
Comprehensive TMTpost Media, OpenAI official website, X platform, Leidi.com, etc.
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