RIP Jobs. Sam is back.
Sam Altman is now back as OpenAI CEO.
My earlier post was titled RIP OpenAI, but now that Sam Altman is back, well, it’s RIP Jobs. Before I go further, here is a quick rundown of the core issue behind the OpenAI saga.
One of the issues (apart from 5 more) around OpenAI chaos was the evolving nature of the company - i.e. whether it is an
AI research company (whose job is to help humanity/Ilya Sutskever represented this faction) vs.
AI-centric commercial org (Sama eventually ended up with this direction).
With Sam Altman coming back as the CEO, clearly the commercial side of OpenAI has won and its biggest investor, Microsoft will double down on the commerce side (unlike the past when MS didn’t even have a board seat). MS will ensure that they drive the commercial side of the integration.
It's not about who's got powers, morons. It's about who's not afraid. And who's going to do what has to be done
What Sam knows
He knows that he is now the undisputed king of the AI world and has the support of all (every damn investor, tech celebrity)
He will now go all-in. Almost like a mafia don.
By the way, he is known to change his stance - right from OpenAI starting as a non-profit to what it is now. So expect a lot more surprises in the coming days.
Few months back, he was touring the world and meeting governments to warn them of the possible AI apocalypse. Till that point, he was answerable to the board
“The board can fire me, I think that’s important,” Altman told Bloomberg in June
But now, he isn’t.
In the end, the board couldn’t fire him and now that the board has lost its powers, Sam has shown who is the real boss (by the way, we all should admire how calmly he handled the exit and went with the flow (even accepted MS offer) without any negativity against any individual).
In terms of new launches, here is what I’d expect Sam Altman to do in the next few weeks/months
Expect GPT-5 in 6 months (or even before than that). Turbo itself is a decent improvement over 4 - I am not sure where 5 will take us.
He will now go after Nvidia and get into chip business (to power LLMs) as well.
It will be ruthless execution from now on.
Brace yourself.