Episode 40 The Rise and Fall... and Rise of Sam Altman has Grave Implications for AI Research and Humanity

Tech Uncensored - An Altitude Accelerator Podcast

From the sidelines, reading the media reports on the weekend of November 17 it was a series of irrepressible events that unfolded that weekend and the coming days. It was considered a tumultuous weekend, a series of uncontrolled outcomes, each with its own significance to the fallout of OpenAI and its employees. While the world watched this drama unfold online, no one would have guessed the outcome of events that transpired within the course of the coming days: the firing of Sam Altman… the quitting of OpenAI president, Greg Brockman and the threatened resignations from 700 employees of Open AI… to the requested resignation of the Board… to the hiring of Brockman and Altman as new MS employees… to the final decision to reinstate Altman as CEO of Open AI with new board members in tow – all in the course of 5 days.

What these events with Open AI and Microsoft have signalled are some unprecedented implications for the AI community, its researchers and more importantly the more far reaching impacts to the society for which AI is built.

So what does this all mean...
- when a nonprofit side, with no financial incentives is unable to effectively oust an executive because of legitimate safety concerns
- when a structure that was put in place to mitigate the risk of unilaterial control of advanced AI and was essentially was usurped by the same capitalistic forces - this structure were designed to prevent

We welcome Christoph Schuhmann, Cofounder of LAION.AI, Large-scale Artificial Intelligence Open Network, a non profit organization, who has a large community of volunteers, data scientistis, researchers, practitioners developing applications in this field, to weigh in on the events of November 17-21, 2023 and what it means to the AI Community