What Actually Matters with the Latest OpenAI Controversy

Today on the AI Daily Brief, more controversy surrounding OpenAI. Before that in the headlines, ChatGPT is now being used by 7% of Americans daily. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in the show. Notes welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition. All the AI headline news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with an earnings report from Nvidia and surprise, surprise, it just keeps getting bigger, Wall Street Journal writes Nvidia delivered a record quarter and signaled that the AI boom is still going strong, driving its already meteoric stock up above $1,000 a share. Revenue last quarter more than tripled year over year to 26 billion and net profit was up 7x to 14.88 billion. Both were quarterly records and both beat analysts expectations. The stock market obviously love this, with share prices up 6% in pre market trading following the report and a single share surpassing $1,000. One of the things that's also really interesting though is that while currently the big cloud companies like Google, Microsoft and Amazon account for around 45% of Nvidia's data center revenue, they're clearly trying to move to a world where they're not just selling to data centers, but also selling directly to companies. At Dell's big annual event this week, for example, Nvidia and Dell talked about how they were trying to create the AI factories of the future where individual companies had more direct to this sort of capacity, CEO Jensen Huang said. We are poised for our next wave of growth. From Bloomberg, Nvidia emphasized Wednesday that it wants to sell its technology to a wider market, expanding beyond the giant cloud computing providers known as hyperscalers. Huang said that AI is moving to consumer Internet companies, carmakers, biotechnology and health care customers. The large scale deployment of Nvidia chips by Elon Musk's Tesla is one sign of that expansion. It continues to be a battle for Nvidia to keep up with demand, said Huang. Nobody has ever manufactured supercomputers at volume. We're doing the best we can. The one other interesting note as called out by the Verge, was that Nvidia will now make new AI chips every single year, said Huang. I can announce that after Blackwell there's another chip. We're on a one year rhythm. The Verge points out that until now Nvidia produced a new architecture roughly once every two years Ampere in 2020, Hopper in 2022, Blackwell in 2024, but that everything is getting faster now. Next up in the headlines. You'll remember that recently Microsoft inked a deal with UAE based G42. Part of why I was so interested in the deal is that it seemed to have been facilitated by the Department of Commerce and reflected geopolitics as much as business considerations. Basically, G42 had been right at the center of the US China tension and the US had been putting a ton of pressure on it to pick a side. Well, pick a side it did, and Microsoft's minority investment of $1.5 billion was part of that picking. Still, it's not without complications, writes Reuters. Microsoft President Brad Smith said the tech company's high profile deal with The UAE backed AI firm G42 could eventually involve the transfer of sophisticated chips and tool, a move that a senior Republican congressman warned could have national security implications, said Michael McCall, the Republican chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Despite the significant national security implications, Congress still has not received a comprehensive briefing from the Executive Branch about this agreement. I am concerned the right guardrails are not in place to protect sensitive US origin technology from Chinese espionage, given the CCP's interest in the UAE. To me this sounds a little bit like if this really was coming from the Department of Commerce, that was obviously a White House facilitated deal that Congress just doesn't have visibility into. Anyway, there's tons more details here, but what's interesting to me continues to be just the geopolitical implications of AI and how quickly they've become an ongoing concern in the world of M and A. I'm wondering if we're not about to see a bit of a wave of consolidation in the AI space. We've had a couple boom years of funding and now we're very naturally in the phase where companies are figuring out if there's enough of a there there to raise a next round or if it makes sense to try to join up with someone bigger. One company seemingly going through that decision making process is Adept, which was valued by investors at more than a billion last year and which, the Information Reports, has held talks recently around a possible sale or strategic partnership with large tech companies. Most notably Meta. Adept is in the much vaunted AI agent space. And of course that means they're dealing with not only intense competition from every angle and every direction, but also the fact that AI agents are still at this point highly theoretical. There is an existing consumer demand to tap into. It's a new behavior and a new category that's being invented on the fly. When it comes to something that challenging, they may decide that it makes sense to do that from within one of the big giants that has the capital to actually pursue it to its full ends. Speaking of big companies, in what will be a surprise to no one, Amazon is apparently planning to give Alexa an AI upgrade as well as a monthly subscription fee. Notably, this will not be included in Amazon prime subscriptions, write cnbc. Amazon will launch a more conversational version of Alexa later this year, potentially positioning it to better compete with new generative AI powered chatbots from companies including Google and OpenAI. Will the end of the year see us watching a souped up Alexa compete with a souped up Siri, both of them competing against some brand new OpenAI product? Kind of seems like it. Speaking of an OpenAI product, the Washington Post reports that OpenAI didn't actually copy Scarlett Johansson's voice, they write, when OpenAI issued a casting call last May for a secret project to endow OpenAI's popular ChatGPT with a human voice, the flyer had several requests. The actors should be non union, they should sound between 25 and 45 years old, and their voices should be warm, engaging and charismatic. One thing the AI company didn't request, according to interviews with multiple people involved in the process and documents shared by OpenAI in response to questions from the Washington Post. A clone of actress Scarlett Johansson. This of course gets to the conversation that's been happening where Scarlett Johansson released a statement expressing concern that she had been asked by OpenAI to use her voice and when she said no, there ended up being a voice that kind of sounded like her. As I mentioned in a previous episode, I think there are multiple things going on here. There is the legal side of this, which is which at least this reporting from the Washington Post suggests that there might not be a there there. There's also just the broader question of the look and the public's trust, or lack thereof, in Sam Altman and OpenAI. For now though, that is going to do it for today's headlines. Stay tuned for the main episode. Hello friends. Before we get back to the episode, I want to tell you about something special I'm doing on Super Intelligent this June. Super is of course our platform for AI learning, and I've heard from a lot of you that you really want something for a true AI beginner, someone who's really just getting their feet wet with these tools. So what I'm going to do is put together basically a course that sits on top of and uses super intelligent tutorials and lessons, but where I hand guide you through around 10 different lessons and how tos that I think once you complete them will have you ahead of 80% of the other people who are just starting to use AI right now. If you are interested in this learning experience, go to be super AI and sign up using code June. You'll get 25% off your first month and I'll automatically add you to that AI for Beginners group. That's BE Super AI Discount Code June. See you there. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. It's been another day and yet this news cycle around OpenAI and former board member Helen Toner's comments about OpenAI has continued to dominate headlines in many ways. I think the coverage around it reflects a sort of sensational gossipification of media where what we're really interested in is the controversy, not the substance. But but I also think that the nature of the discussion is such that even if one does find the particulars frustrating or annoying, I think that it does reveal something about people's underlying sensibilities about the importance of the AI industry. So let's go back and talk about a couple days of announcements and then get into the controversy. Over the last couple weeks we have of course seen a number of high profile departures from OpenAI. First we finally got resolution on what was going to happen with OpenAI Chief Scientist and co founder Ilya Sutskever. Ilia had been reportedly important in the initial ouster of Sam Altman, but then halfway through the controversy reverse course and came to support Sam coming back and in the wake of the whole campaign everyone was wondering what was going to happen. It was one of the questions that Sam Altman got the most in interviews to which he was always very circumspect. He always said that he hoped he continued to work with Ilia, that Ilya was a generational mind, but that he wasn't sure what was going to happen. However, in the middle of May we found out what happened and it was indeed Ilya leaving. Many wondered if this had been prearranged with Ilya agreeing to if he did ultimately decide to leave, not doing so for six months to create a little normalcy in the wake of the board shake up. But in any case he was gone. Next up was OpenAI's head of super alignment Jan Leakey, also leaving a couple days after Ilya's announcement and doing so in a fairly loud way where he basically said that OpenAI was not doing enough to prepare for these alignment challenges. The responses to this were very divergent. On the one hand, there were many folks who took it as a clear indicator that self governance wasn't working at OpenAI. The that there were big safety concerns with OpenAI and that, for example, government needed to get more involved. Then on the flip side, there were those like Tyler Cowan, the Bloomberg columnist and writer of Marginal Revolution, who saw in it something very different. Basically in these changes, along with a recently announced plan from Chuck Schumer and other bipartisan leaders around Regulating AI, that the political capital of the AI safety movement was seemingly on the decline. This is a divergence that I think is worth paying attention to, because one of the ways to read OpenAI's actions recently is that they don't feel as much pressure as they used to when it comes to these big questions of alignment, AI risk and AI safety. Following up from that, the company did announce a new safety committee. They call it the Safety and Security Committee, and it's basically people who are already at OpenAI. Once again, the responses were pretty divergent, with the AI safety folks being none too pleased with this plan. But for a lot of others, the focus from the announcement was that they were finally discussing whatever would come after GPT4. Now, people have widely assumed that OpenAI has been training GPT5 for some time now, but this seemed to be the first acknowledgment that it was actually in progress and that suggested to many that it might be coming soon. Then, however, the new Ted AI show, hosted by Bilawal Sidhu, which featured former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, dropped and started to dominate the conversation. Bilawal tweeted what really happened at OpenAI? Former board member Helen Toner breaks her silence with shocking new details about Sam Altman's firing. In it, Helen got a little bit more explicit about some of the reasons that the board had come to mistrust Sam Altman, but the big banner headline that everyone latched onto was that she claimed that she and a number of the board members learned about ChatGPT on Twitter. This seemed to some to be shocking and a clear indication of just how much contempt that Sam Altman had for this board, a validator of the argument that he was not to be trusted. Liam Balling, who notably works for Google Gemini, wrote this past week has raised questions about transparency and employee voice at OpenAI. Now Liam pointed out that it wasn't just the Helen Toner controversy, but also the dissolving of the previous safety models at OpenAI, as well as the big dust up around OpenAI HR threatening to claw back vested equity from employees who don't sign non disparagement agreements. And of course on top of that is the whole dust up with Scarlett Johansson and the legal dispute around the Sky Voice that they used to debut GPT4.O. And indeed for some this was the point that there was a big pattern emerging here that seems problematic. Benjamin Decracker writes, I've repeatedly called out Sam Altman for what seems to me a repeat pattern of dishonesty. He says whatever it takes to get his way. Benjamin here pointed to that Helen Toner interview. However, this wasn't the universal opinion. Adapie, for example, writes stunning display of incompetence GPT 3.5 API was released in March 2022. It was wrapped into ChatGPT in November 2022. It went viral. The audacity of we learned about ChatGPT on Twitter. The point of this statement was something that I believe has absolutely gotten lost in this whole discourse, which is that no one at OpenAI expected ChatGPT to be the viral sensation. It was this point that the underlying model GPT 3.5 was already released is a really salient one. We have a sort of hindsight bias knowing how fast ChatGPT exploded that forgets that it was possible that they had no idea that it was going to be this big thing. To them it was a meaningful product launch, but really nothing more than a blog post and the latest thing that they were doing. For those board members that weren't in the day to day trenches, there is at least an argument that it wasn't in the minds of the OpenAI staff some super important board notification type of moment. And of course this is what frustrates me about the nature of media discourse right now, is that the thing getting all the headlines, which is this we found out about ChatGPT on Twitter, is actually much less significant than these underlying questions of repeat patterns of problematic behavior, which to the extent that one wants to focus on these things, should be the focus here. Still, the reason that I thought it was worth discussing on this show is that one of the things that is clear when you watch the discourse around OpenAI is that everyone has a sense that this technology is going to be hugely, socially and economically significant. Because of that, absolutely everything that the leader in that space, at least based on technology state of the art does undergoes a microscope like normal companies aren't subjected to. It is an indicator to me, hold aside any particular opinions on OpenAI or its leader Sam Altman, that the sense of the importance of generative AI to the future is immense and that there is likely to be more and not less attention on it in the years to come. Now a couple danumas to this story which got lost in all of the controversy. One is that OpenAI has apparently backtracked on previous comments saying that their mission is not to build superintelligence. From the financial times, while OpenAI is racing ahead with AI development, a senior OpenAI executive seemed to backtrack on previous comments by its CEO Sam Altman, that it was ultimately aiming to build a super intelligence far more advanced than humans. Anna Makonju, OpenAI's vice president of global affairs, told the Financial Times in an interview that its mission was to build artificial general intelligence capable of, quote, cognitive tasks that are what a human could do today. Said our mission is to build AGI. I would not say our mission is to build superintelligence. Superintelligence is a technology that is going to be orders of magnitude more intelligent than human beings on Earth. I think this is more than just a bingo game of pick your acronyms. I think there is a big middle space of discussion and people who might be very interested in coming to something close to what we now imagine as AGI, but who don't want to unleash super smart robots that are 10 times better than us at everything on our species. I'll be watching to see if these comments are repeated and doubled down on in the future or if this is just one errant moment. For now though, lots of interesting things continue to happen. Obviously I much prefer it when there are interesting technology stories to report on, but that's what's going on in the world of AI today. So that's what we had to discuss. Appreciate you listening or watching as always. Until next time. Peace. Sam.