Executive Sam Altman, one of the founders of OpenAI, the company that develops ChatGPT, is negotiating his return to the company where he was fired on Friday, according to the North American press.
Altman, who has become the visible face of the company that develops the popular ChatGPT ‘chatbot’, has the support of several investors, according to The New York Times. Also negotiating a return is OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, who resigned when he heard the news of Altman’s resignation.
Still, sources indicate there is no guarantee the executives will return to the company.
Among those supporting Altman’s return is Microsoft, which has invested several billion dollars in the company, which it considers its partner in artificial intelligence, according to the news channel CNBC.
Altman was fired by OpenAI’s board of directors on Friday in what appears to be an internal power struggle that surprised Silicon Valley (the United States’ leading technology ecosystem), where Altman is seen as a wunderkind.
In a statement, the government said Altman “was not consistently honest in his communications,” which affected his ability “to discharge his responsibilities.”
“The board of directors no longer has confidence in his ability to continue to lead OpenAI,” the statement said, without addressing Altman’s alleged lack of honesty.
Systems engineer Mira Murati, a former product manager at Tesla and until now chief technology officer at OpenAI, was named interim executive president.
Altman was co-founder and chairman of OpenAI, along with Elon Musk, who left the company in 2018.
The company has been at the forefront of generative artificial intelligence since it launched ChatGPT a year ago, a “chatbot” that went viral for its ability to chat with people.
It is structured as a non-profit organization and governed by a board of directors with an independent majority, that is, without capital participation, which means that investors have no decision-making power, at least officially.
Altman, 38 years old, is considered a visionary in the field of generative artificial intelligence (technology that creates conversations, texts, audio, music, video).
He has positioned himself politically. He described Donald Trump as a “threat to the national security” of the United States and created an application in 2016 to encourage young people to vote. In 2019, he organized a fundraiser in favor of Democratic candidate Andrew Yand, who proposes a universal basic income that would offset job losses caused by technology.
“It’s not complicated. We need technology to create more wealth and policies that distribute it fairly,” Sam Altman wrote on his blog.
He also opined in 2021 that technological progress over the next hundred years will “far exceed anything accomplished since we mastered fire and invented the wheel.”
Last week, he attended the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit in San Francisco and said artificial intelligence will be bigger than “any of the great technological revolutions we’ve had so far,” but also acknowledged the need to protect humanity against the future threat of artificial intelligence. Computer experts see this as a way to distract from the problems that artificial intelligence already poses today.
The US government is particularly concerned about the role that generative artificial intelligence will play during the 2024 election campaign.
Technology facilitates the creation of hyper-realistic montages (‘deepfake’) and false content, thereby facilitating disinformation campaigns.
“There is a lot of unknown, we still don’t know what generative artificial intelligence is capable of, especially in video,” Sam Altman admitted at APEC, as this will happen quickly, especially in election years, so it is necessarily good keep an eye on.
Source: DN
