Project Q*, AGI & the Sam Altman Saga

If you all have been following the news since Nov 17, you would be knowing about this guy named Sam Altman who happened and now re-happens to be the CEO of OpenAI.
Throughout the news we can see one thing, the board made a horrible mistake by firing him and now have taken a step back and now have reinstated him as the CEO of OpenAI.

Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI

2015: OpenAI is founded and it brands itself as a non profit organisation which wants to create AI to help humanity. As we could expect it faced a funding crunch very soon. So, OpenAI was forces to become a "capped profit" org. in 2019. To stick to their original cause, they made sure that the profit which the body that would be set up under the "capped profit" org, would be governed by a non profit.

The board which was set up, consisted of Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever which were the employees of OpenAI, and 3 non-employees namely, Quora CEO Adam D Angelo, Entrepreneur Tasha Mccauley and Helen Toner, a researcher and strategist.

Nov 17: The board summoned Sam and informed him that he was fired. OpenAI gave the following explanation:

Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft , tweeted this after he came to know about the firing:

Microsoft made a move which the original board never expected. The members who were in support of the firing, Ilya Sutskever, Adam D Angelo, Tasha Mccauley and Helen Toner, were shocked. OpenAI started losing investors and Microsoft, a big investor, gave OpenAI a jolt. Soon, out of the 770 employees (approximately), around 720 employees signed a letter which threatened to quit and join Microsoft if Sam was not reinstated.

Mira Murati who was the interim CEO, also quit in support of Sam. New CEO Emmett Shear too quit in support of Sam.

Soon, there was a rejig in the board and who ever supported the decision was instead, was fired. Only one out of the 6 who were in the initial board was retained. That was Adam D Angelo, Quora CEO.

Nov 22 : OpenAI reaches an agreement with Sam Altman to be reinstated as the CEO. The new board contained Adam D Angelo, Bret Taylor, Larry Summers.

Now you might be wondering why Sam was fired. No one knows the real reason but there are some speculations. However I will discuss only one:

Project Q*

Project Q* was a project which could solve basic math problems when it was in its training stage itself. It was a step towards AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. Although solving math problems doesnt seem a big step, these are not any random simple calculations. AGI could solve complex math problems which require language understanding, logical reasoning, problem solving and learning from feedback, etc., skills which a human knows. AGI is a s dangerous as it gets. It may seem small, but this might lead to very big implications like the development of AI which can learn and think by itself.

Elon Musk once said:

“Mark my words, AI is far more dangerous than nukes…why do we have no regulatory oversight?”

“I have exposure to the most cutting edge AI, and I think people should be really concerned by it…AI is a fundamental risk to the existence of human civilization in a way that car accidents, airplane crashes, faulty drugs or bad food were not — they were harmful to a set of individuals within society, of course, but they were not harmful to society as a whole.”

OpenAI thought that we should not be developing such AI and it (might be, still speculation only) the reason for Sam's ouster.

However, Sam has come back, stronger than what he went with.

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So this was the Sam Altman Saga. Hope you liked it,

Aniruddha KP

Sources:

1. https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2023/02/03/exclusive-openai-sam-altman-chatgpt-agi-google-search/?sh=7f4b9c316a63

2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgLkvKb8OhM&t=44s

3.https://twitter.com/satyanadella/status/1726509045803336122

4. https://openai.com/blog/openai-announces-leadership-transition

5. https://twitter.com/OpenAI?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor

6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iRUe5GBWR8