Who won the Sam Altman / OpenAI debacle? The winner - no matter what happens next - is clear.

Today, what Sam Altman's firing from OpenAI means for professional users of artificial intelligence, and specifically the ChatGPT tools. So as you know, my name is Enrico. I'm an AI attorney. I represent AI companies, but I'm also a power user of AI as a professional, leveraging AI tools to provide better quality and less time for my clients. And I've got several thousand people who follow me, uh, and these videos, which I know I haven't done one in a while. We'll get to that in a minute. Uh, and so I wanted to talk today about this earth-shattering, uh, historic, unprecedented news about Sam Altman last Friday being fired by the board of OpenAI in what was really a coup by his, uh, one of his founding members. Uh, Ilya Sutskever is the chief data scientist for OpenAI. He's the brains behind the operation. Sam Altman is the CEO. Sam is the face of the company, but Ilya is by far and away the heart and soul of the technology that is the large language model machine learning, uh, AI tool that has been launched by OpenAI and iterated on as 3, 3.5, And now 4 and 4 Turbo. So this is interesting because Elon is the person that got Sam out, from what we can tell. And now there's drama because Elon realizes he may have just killed one of the most important companies in the history of mankind, is asking for Sam to come back, is apologizing for essentially a coup against Sam. And of course, what happened over the weekend is virtually the entire company decided that they were going with Sam, leaving OpenAI with basically no talent. And then even more crazy— well, we'll get to that in a minute. So today I'm going to do a couple of things. We're going to recap a little bit of the history just in case you haven't been following the course of events, and then we're going to talk about something that I've been talking about since March of this year about What should you be doing as a professional user of artificial intelligence tools in order to 10x your game and your company's game, your business's game? And my advice today is no different than it's been all along. And it turns out that at least as of today, I'm more right than I was even last week. So we're going to recap the million-dollar question, which is, if you are a professional looking to leverage AI, if you are a company looking to bring AI tools to bear on your business, what should you be doing? What should you not be doing? And so we'll get to that a little bit later in this video. So we're also going to talk about the 3 things that, that you should absolutely be doing next, now that we've had this development with OpenAI. Now that there's a lot that's been put in jeopardy, the world's been turned upside down, certainly the world of artificial intelligence, but really the entire world, because many companies, many people believed that OpenAI was going to lead the AI revolution and bring us into the age of artificial intelligence. We're also going to talk about at the end of this, you know, what does this mean for the world? What does this mean for you as a business user? What do I predict is going to happen next. And disclaimer, there's a lot of predictions going on out there. I listen to them, I listen to the top experts, so I'll give you some insights that not are, not are, are just mine, but of all the people who are in the know. So let's just go right into this: what Sam Altman's firing from OpenAI means for professional users. Let's just start with the basics, right? If you're a business professional or a company investing time or money in AI tools, then the last 3 days of events, 4 days of events, prove what I've been saying since April. And the most important thing for a business user of AI to know has been validated and expanded by the drama unfolding in Silicon Valley. What is the background here? All right, so Before really getting into what I'm sure you're here for, which is what should you do next, let's just talk a little bit about how we got to today, how we got to Monday, November 20th at 7:20 PM Eastern Standard Time. So just to recap briefly, we're not going to get into the weeds here, but Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI by the board. They indicated that they had no confidence in him, that they didn't believe that he had been forthright with the board. Everyone thought, well, it must be something more than that, right? He had some— maybe some outside interests with some foreign companies. Maybe he was monetizing his expertise in some other way outside of OpenAI. Whatever it happens to be, none of those things could possibly justify what actually happened here, which is potentially the destruction of a company. So it was certainly a rift over something that may have had to do with AI safety, which would be Ela's concern as the academic non-business person. who is always erring on the side of caution with AI— don't release any new tools. We just had, uh, the OpenAI Dev Day in which these GPT agents were released onto, onto the world. We'll do more on that in a future video. Regardless, there was certainly some controversy, I'm sure, internally with regards to monetizing ChatGPT in such an overt way, given its nonprofit altruistic Nature, which was supposed to be mankind first, profit second. And as we started to get further down the line, Ela certainly had a much more cautious approach as the scientist, and from my point of view, a pretty big ego than Sam Altman had, which was to try and bring in money so that they continue to grow this tool, release things onto the world, and hope for the best, right? So, uh, there's also another founder. His name is Greg Brockman, and his role was as former president of OpenAI. So as soon as, as soon as Sam got fired, he quit. He resigned in protest. And then of course, lots of other people indicated that they were resigning, and even behind the scenes, uh, indicating that they were going to also resign, uh, in support of Sam Altman. So you can see, just even at this point in the story, when you lose all your talent, especially in California which doesn't have non-compete agreements, you may be done as a result of this kind of corporate action. And there's reasons why the board of directors who had no interest in OpenAI, who were independent, who were supposed to be protecting the nonprofit's, uh, interest, may have been the fatal flaw in all this— that they didn't operate as a normal board and therefore didn't consider the things that most capitalist, venture capital-driven board of directors would certainly have considered before taking this kind of really insane action against a very popular face of the company. So, uh, there's certainly, uh, a lot of displeasure now. Uh, there was quickly an announcement that Microsoft, which is a 49% owner of OpenAI's for-profit LLC, Uh, was going to be hiring Sam Altman, and then of course Greg would be joining him, and then presumably lots of other OpenAI employees. So that was crazy. Microsoft was now going to bring in all the talent and get access to all the IP of OpenAI, in which it's a 49% investor. We're going to circle back on what all that really might mean for, for Microsoft at the end of this video, so stay tuned. Um, but what's more important, Microsoft's initial investment totaling about $13 billion, or the hundreds of billions it might make off of the chaos that has ensued at OpenAI by simply taking that team and bringing it in-house? All right, so then there was new leadership brought on at OpenAI, and then even more crazy than the story is right now You have OpenAI's board backtracking and saying, "Oops, mulligan. We're gonna bring Sam Altman back." And you had Elon, you know, Suskoffer basically apologize on Twitter, saying, "Hey, look it, I made a mistake. I don't want anything bad to happen. You know, I want the best for all the employees." And then essentially what happened on like Sunday was. All of a sudden they're going to bring Sam Altman back. Well, by Monday morning, all of that changed. Microsoft is back in play, and it now appears yet again that Microsoft is, uh, is going to become the new employer of Sam, and that team is going to move from OpenAI over to Microsoft. So wow, that is— it's the stuff of movies. You couldn't make this up. In fact, to write what happens next in this story, the apocalyptic aspect of what might happen next, that would be really interesting, right? You can certainly predict some stuff. And just food for thought, a lot of the conspiracy theories going around were things like they built a time machine. 15 years from now, they decided they had to send someone back to fire Sam out of OpenAI in order to save us from artificial general intelligence, right? Or Terminator-style, save us from the robot. So all kinds of crazy stuff like that has been, uh, has been rumored around. And after the rumor mill has kind of gotten done spinning, we're kind of left with the head scratching. Clearly there was some disagreement between the board and Sam, but whatever it was, it couldn't possibly justify Uh, what the board did in terms of potentially destroying OpenAI. So, uh, look at my takeaway since March, April of last year. Even though I'm an evangelist, even though I'm a power user of AI tools all day long, but the, the 1%, the 1/10 of 1% that actually work, that deliver value rather than the 99.9% that are not ready for prime time. And I use these tools all day long in order to up my game. And I've done a lot of videos on how you can do that too. But then I stopped making some videos, you might have noticed, because I was using them so aggressively in my practice. I can't share attorney-client information on these videos with you. And so— and I hadn't really adopted any more tools than I was using, say, back in July. So those videos are still good. It's still what I'm doing. I just happen to be doing it every day. And my message back then is the same message as I have for you right here, which is 99% of the AI tools out there are not ready for primetime use. And the, the companies, the startups that are developing these tools, many of them are very high risk because, well, until Friday, OpenAI could just launch a store like it did with GPT- Uh, with GPT agents that can be developed on the OpenAI platform that no longer make an API tool necessary, right? Keep in mind, one of the big fights here between Microsoft, the investor, and OpenAI behind the scenes has been OpenAI wants everyone to go through their website or tie into their API, whereas Microsoft, they just want an AI to be baked into their operating system, into their 365 tools, so that It's part of your desktop or virtual desktop experience. So they don't want you to go to chatgpt.com in order to, to access that tool, right? They want you to just live within the Microsoft environment. Well, there's another risk factor, right? And what happened over these last few days may move us closer to Microsoft getting their wish, uh, if in fact OpenAI takes a big step backwards here, as they appear to be doing. So they're not ready for prime time. So what should you be doing as a business user? This is a relatively short video. Let's get to the point. Here's what I'm recommending as an expert in AI tools for professional business users representing AI companies. So if you are one of those users or businesses integrating AI tools, uh, there's a couple of things that are still right there for you and in play. And the first one is the same as as the old one, the one I've been evangelizing for many months, which is learn how to use the 1% of business-ready primetime AI tools that are already out there. And what you're gonna see is that I use 3 tools essentially: ChatGPT Plus as a $20 a month user so that I get the security, they don't use my data to train, I can upload, you know, confidential information in the system. And it's not being used by ChatGPT in any regard, including it is not used to train its model. And so I use ChatGPT Plus for all kinds of things, all kinds of things, all day long. We'll get into those in some future videos. I'll find a way to share information with you without divulging too many of my, uh, my personal secrets and divulging none of my client secrets. The second tool I use is the same one you've heard about, which is Whisper technology, which is found in the OpenAI Playground, the developer tools. And these are speech-to-text recognition tools. And that's the third one down here, which I use because you can always talk faster than you can type. So I dictate all day long all the things that are in my head, and then I cut and paste those into emails, I cut and paste those into ChatGPT, I cut and paste those into documents. Um, I use it to, you know, to direct my artificial intelligence assistant as to the next thing to do, how to improve on that thing, all the way to the final work product. So OpenAI Whisper technology, there's videos on that, I'll link to them, on how you leverage that great tool, which hopefully will remain available. I assume it will. And then there's a variety of AI speech-to-text tools for meetings that you can plug into Google Meet, Zoom, Teams, whatever that transcribe the entire meeting, the entire call, so that you have a permanent transcript of that conversation, which sounds good. No, no, no, no. Revolutionary. Revolutionary to be able to have an AI-enabled transcript that's near perfect, that identifies every speaker that you can then run AI on top of. For every conversation you ever have, to have a perfect institutional memory, to share that institutional memory with your team, to share it with your clients and customers. It's game-changing. It's revolutionary. It is the most incredible tool that you will ever have. And I can have a conversation 3 months ago with client and have that transcript available and go back and have it say, hey, here's what's happened with the client since then. Please let me know what the client's primary concerns were. I'm going to now upload the work product. Let me know if there are any unaddressed concerns comparing them with the transcript, whatever. Tell me the next 3 things that the client wants me to do, and AI will take that query, run it on the transcript, and very quickly provide you answers. So just like you would an assistant— hey, go find me out this it's doing it in real time. So these AI speech-to-text tools, incredibly powerful. So ChatGPT Plus, Whisper technology, and a variety of text, uh, text-to-speech tools that do transcription of meetings, which by the way, when you integrate them, they send to all the people attending the meeting that the AI note-taker will be attending. And you start each one of those meetings off by saying, just so you know, there's an AI note-taker in this meeting. You'll get a transcript of the call after work, if we're done, does anyone have any objection to having this meeting transcribed? No one objects. They just want to know if they can have the transcript too and also run the same AI on that transcript. So if you're a client, say, what did Enrico tell me about this? They don't have to read the transcript. It's going to tell you in real time what Enrico said about this. So those are the, those are the 3 tools I've been using day in and day out since the last time we spoke. And there are videos on each one of these, and we'll be doing some more in the future. So learn how to use the 1% of business-ready AI tools that are ready for primetime today. If you are a business user or a business integrating AI, that's what you should be doing. That's what you should have been doing before. That's what you should still do in the future. Bank on the fact that in all likelihood, OpenAI and ChatGPT are still going to be there, uh, you know, a month from now, 2 months from now. Whether or not they maintain their lead is another matter. All right, so the second thing you need to do is understand how AI works in order to be able to leverage this technology tool, to know how to use it and use it effectively, which most people aren't using it the right way at all. They're using it completely the wrong way. And if you've seen my videos, you know I'm constantly talking about you are using this as an AI assistant. You're not having it do your work for you. You're having it assist you in doing your work. There's a big difference. And in order to delegate to an assistant, you have to speak to that assistant in a certain way. And when they bring you work product, you have to be able to give it back to them and say, now refine it this way. No, you didn't do this right. Go back and do it again. Go back and add this. Hey, now I want you to take these next 3 steps. You talk to your AI assistant the exact same way, exactly as though it was a real person. So in order to understand how AI works as a large language model, how it's guessing the next word, that it can't really do great math because math is not words, math is not language, right? It doesn't do case law research because it's not connected to any case law databases. So don't complain that it gets case citations wrong, you idiot. It doesn't have access to case law. Case law is in proprietary databases that Westlaw and Lexis and some of these other people pay to have access to. AI wasn't trained on it. ChatGPT was not trained on it. So of course it's not going to get it right. It's not a hallucination. You're hallucinating if you think that it can do something that it cannot do. Your job is to understand these limitations, and, and by knowing limitations, you'll be able to get the best use out of the tool. All right, and then the third thing is something that it continues to become more important. Our most trafficked web page on our website is All about developing an acceptable use policy for AI within your organization. You need to have policies. Everyone's got to know how to use it securely. Everyone needs to know which tools they're allowed to use and not allowed to use. They're going to use a tool, that tool has to be vetted so that it is approved by the committee that's in charge of vetting the AI tools so that you know it's secure and you're not giving away your proprietary information. So For those, uh, people who've been following me in the, I think, nearly 50,000, 100,000 views of our videos that, that have already occurred, you know these are the same 3 things that I've been talking about since April of last— of this year, of 2023, when all of a sudden things exploded. Keep doing these things. It's the same things, and they are just as important today as they were yesterday, and they'll continue to be important Even with all the chaos that's going on in the world. All right, so you're a business user, you're a business using AI. Let's circle back on what's going on with OpenAI. What is going to happen next? That's what everyone keeps asking me. Enrico, what's going to happen next? Well, things can change completely tomorrow, right? Um, Sam Altman is still being courted back to OpenAI, who I'm sure is saying, look, we created this together, we changed the world. If you leave, we die. Maybe that's not actually true, but it could get sold off for parts, right? So Sam Altman, I believe, is a person of integrity, and I think that he is struggling right now to decide whether to continue negotiating with Microsoft, even though it's been reported he's going— no way the ink's dry on that deal, right? Still being drafted and negotiated. Or whether or not he saves OpenAI by going back with a new business structure Um, a new board of directors structure, a new board of directors, right? But no matter what, Microsoft is holding the winning hand here. So even if he goes back, they are still going to get stuff out of this. And if he stays with Microsoft and brings all that intellectual property and people with him, again, doesn't matter which way this thing goes, it certainly seems as though Microsoft wins. For those of you know me, you know I'm a Mac guy. You know I'm not a Windows guy. I've been using Apple computers forever. I hate Windows. I use Google products— Google Docs, Google Drive, all these different things. When OpenAI came on the scene, as I surveyed the landscape, I had to bite the bullet and decide that I was going to gravitate away from Google products and into— back into Microsoft, Microsoft 365. Because Microsoft was aligned with OpenAI. Now Microsoft may actually control OpenAI or take over OpenAI. Microsoft wins, Microsoft wins, Microsoft wins. Hate to say it, but we're moving towards 365 and a full integration onto Microsoft business products. All right, so bet on Microsoft. I think that's one thing that you're going to see a lot of people doing. Um, you need to also be aware that even though Sam is the business side, he helped grow the business, uh, OpenAI, to this staggering level that it currently, or at least had achieved as of Friday. But the brains behind the operation in many regards is Ilya Sutskever, and he is a brilliant scientist. I think he's got a massive ego based on all the many dozens of hours of videos I've watched of him. And I think that ego is what caused him to jump into the, into the mess that he's created here. He had no business background. He's an academic. He's an academic. He is a scientist. He didn't know what the heck he was doing, and he just screwed the pooch here. But watch what he does, because even no matter what Sam does, he's still a power broker Because he understands AI and how this was created, how the LLM was brought to bear, better than just about anyone. He is smart. And so watch him, because whatever he does and wherever he goes, as much as he's going to take a black eye in this thing, he's still the smartest guy in the room. All right, so we've already talked about, you know, Microsoft wanting AI as part of its operating system, which in the cloud I guess is 365, right? You know, that appears to be more likely, uh, and whether or not the technology now gets set back in terms of how fast it gets from here to there, we'll have to wait and see. The chaos is never a good thing for technology development, but, you know, seeing the, the kind of AI tools into Microsoft across everything that you're doing in the Microsoft world is a very likely result. Another thing that's going to happen is everyone else is going to catch up. You know, Google, um, you know, Elon Musk, um, XAI, they are all going to pick up that 18-month, um, uh, um, path that where they were behind. And, and there's no question that the chaos, even in best-case scenario, is going to let some of these players catch up. I don't think that's a good thing for business users because we would have loved it if OpenAI would just have kept delivering better stuff to us faster. Faster because it doesn't— it means less that those, those competitors are going to catch up and more that OpenAI is going to slow down. So hey, you got time to catch your breath. Continue to use the tools that are available. Continue to up your personal game. This is going to be here for the rest of mankind until we're overtaken by robots. So, um, use the time wisely. All right, uh, another thing that could happen is that Microsoft could simply buy OpenAI's tech if OpenAI really takes a near-fatal blow in all of this because it loses all its employees, or most of them. It could be that Microsoft gets the technology free and clear of any limitations and gets to manage the development of that technology. Now, whether that's good or bad for mankind, I leave for another day. It was really nice having some sort of nonprofit vibe, humanity comes first approach that OpenAI was, was spinning. And I think living to some degree at least, um, Microsoft's just out to make money. And, um, maybe we have now, uh, seen that altruistic humanity-based AI may not be possible by way of corporate structure, board structure. And that would certainly be bad news for all of us. But hey, in the meantime, let's use it to our advantage. If you are one of the millions of companies building on OpenAI's API, You need an escape hatch. You need to be able to plug in to a different API. Certainly doable. But for all of our clients out there who are in the AI space, who are developing, especially the ones that we're building exclusively or we're preferred vendors of OpenAI, your ability to raise capital is going to be compromised, and there's going to be a lot of uncertainty built into your business model. My name is Enrico. That's all the AI for today. Stay tuned, subscribe, share, share this video, and join our community of professional AI users.