I often suggest that fiction is a bit too much and that the real world is enough interesting stuff.
Well this OpenAI drama this weekend has been riveting like the last three episodes of a show’s crucial season. Check this out:
The CEO of OpenAI was fired on Friday by the board but might be reinstated as I type this.
OpenAI might be one of the most influential company on the planet in the near future, if not already. Sam Altman is one of the most connected tech dude around. LLMs are truly changing society faster than anything prior and GPT-4 is way ahead. Microsoft and OpenAI just announced in the past few weeks tons of products and services. I believe GPT-4 Turbo allows you to feed it 300 pages of text.
Some rumors are saying that Sam was trying to get “middle east” financing (aka oil-backed, Saudi money) to build hardware to go faster and compete with Nvidia, who has a near monopoly over AI hardware. The problem you see, is that almost all the best hardware foundries are own by Taiwan and a company called TSMC. Who is printing money producing chips for everyone:
If you will, from 2010 to 2020, that’s smartphone growth. 2020 and on, that’s AI/GPUs growth. Yeah.
So we have a young man with an interesting past at the top of a non-profit/for profit company changing the world and which needs dramatic amounts of everything (apparently mid engineers comp at OpenAI is $800K/year) to keep moving, so much that it shakes international relationships and bends chips markets and supply.
The situation is super wild right now.