Monday’s market crash did not exclude Wall Street’s ‘Magnificent Seven’, who cumulatively lost upwards of $650 billion in market cap. To make matters worse, Tuesday ushered in a bleak beginning for Silicon Valley as OpenAI’s president and co-founder, Greg Brockman, announced a sabbatical from OpenAI’s ambitious mission to build a “safe AGI.” Peter Deng, OpenAI’s vice president of consumer products, also announced his untimely departure, and fellow co-founder John Schulman jumped ship to Anthropic.
I’m taking a sabbatical through end of year. First time to relax since co-founding OpenAI 9 years ago. The mission is far from complete; we still have a safe AGI to build.
— Greg Brockman (@gdb) August 6, 2024
OpenAI’s insatiable appetite for data has been a matter of growing concern among its staff and leadership team in 2024. The possibility of OpenAI’s capitalistic greed for data was first entertained when OpenAI lost its chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, and machine-learning researcher, Jan Leike, earlier this year. Leike also went on to join Anthropic to develop “safe AGI,” hinting at OpenAI’s tendency to overlook the ethics behind developing a highly intuitive AGI platform.
OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company.
— Jan Leike (@janleike) May 17, 2024
Concerns surrounding the pace of OpenAI’s AGI goals were amplified on Monday, when Tesla founder Elon Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Greg Brockman for violating their pledge “to pioneer artificial intelligence to benefit humanity in favor of turning it into a multibillion-dollar commercial behemoth.” In the lawsuit, Musk explained the “deceit is of Shakespearean proportions” with regard to OpenAI’s regression from a charitable open-source AI enterprise to a capitalistic hamster wheel valued at $100 billion. This eerily ties back to OpenAI’s ousting saga in November of last year, in which the board removed Sam Altman from the AI throne on the grounds of his lack of transparency. Additionally, Helen Toner, a former OpenAI board member who voted Altman out in November, also concurred in an interview on the TED AI podcast in May that Altman had misled the board “on multiple occasions” about its safety processes.
Despite Brockman’s decision to take time off from OpenAI, Sam Altman’s easily concealed Achilles heel is beginning to show in the undeniable light of day.
