OpenAI adds reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) to their wares, which is going to make those seeking to … [+]
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In today’s column, I examine the recently revealed feature augmenting OpenAI’s advanced o1 AI model that was briefly showcased during the second day of the “12 Days Of OpenAI” video-streamed announcement. The feature is referred to as reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT).
Much of the media has been clamoring that this is “new” as though nobody has ever thought of RFT before.
Sad and silly.
There has indeed been AI research on reinforcement fine-tuning, sometimes labeled as RFT or ReFT. In any case, yes, this is ostensibly new in the sense that it is an additional capability for OpenAI o1 and thus a new feature for the product. That is surely exciting. Please note that OpenAI may have opted to establish RFT in ways differently than others have – right now, their version of RFT is only available on a limited preview basis, and they often keep the nitty-gritty technical details under wraps since they consider their AI models proprietary.
So, one must do a modicum of armchair AI-soothsaying detective work to know what it’s all about.
Let’s talk about it.
This analysis of an innovative proposition is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage on the latest in AI including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here). For my analysis of the key features and vital advancements in the OpenAI o1 AI model, see the link here and the link here, covering various aspects such as chain-of-thought reasoning, reinforcement learning, and the like.
Here’s how RFT is typically conceived.
First, suppose you want to take a generic generative AI or large language model (LLM) and turn it into a domain-specific wizard of sorts.
This is a big trend these days. Most AI is rather generic and a jack-of-all-trades. Some refer to this as AI being an inch deep and a mile long. The aim is to apply generative AI to particular domains such as legal, finance, medical, and the like. Doing so requires going from a mile long and an inch deep to becoming at least many feet deep in a narrow niche of interest.
In case you are interested in how domain-specific instances are derived, I’ve discussed extensively the adaptation of generative AI for performing legal advisement, see the link here, while another domain that I’ve explored in-depth is the use of generative AI for mental health guidance, see the link here. The usual method or technique employed consists of in-context modeling, or retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), which you can read about in my explanation at the link here.
There is a kind of pursuit of the Holy Grail when it comes to finding the best way to push a generic generative AI into achieving domain-specific proficiency.
Voila, that takes us to the grand promise and hope of using reinforcement fine-tuning or RFT.
The deal is this.
RFT is a method or technique that leans into fine-tuning a generic generative AI model to become domain-specific in some respects. You can accomplish this by putting together data that pertains to the domain of interest, feeding it into the generative AI, and using the RFT approach to guide the AI toward “learning” about the domain.
The AI model is incrementally fine-tuned by providing a semblance of reinforcement to the AI. When AI gets things right, it is instructed that it’s doing well and should adjust toward producing future answers similarly (essentially, being given a reward for being correct). When the AI during this data training gets something wrong, it is instructed that the response was incorrect, and therefore the AI ought to steer away from that approach in the future (a penalty for being incorrect).
That’s how reinforcement works.
Note that I earlier put the word “learning” into quotes. I did so because we are excessively anthropomorphizing AI by using terminology that applies to humans and then outstretching those words to suggest the same applies to AI. The type of “learning” that the AI is doing should not be considered on par with human learning, see my discussion at the link here. It is a form of mathematical and computational reformulation and adjustment.
Keep in mind that you usually retain the generic aspects that are within the AI model and aren’t necessarily reducing those when trying to bring the AI up to speed on a particular domain. That being said, if you don’t especially need the full breadth of generic generative AI, you might strip down the AI to some barebones and then apply RFT, or possibly do the RFT first and then strip down the resultant AI. It all depends on what your goals are.
Why strip out some of the generic stuff?
Most generative AI is large in size and won’t run natively on smartphones, ergo requiring you to access the AI online. This means you need a reliable online connection. It is also costly due to your accessing expensive servers in the cloud. All in all, a movement toward small language models (SLM) is being avidly pursued so that a reduced-sized and likely reduced functionality version of generative AI can run on a standalone basis on everyday devices, see my analysis at the link here.
The same is often the case when producing domain-specific AI models. You are likely to want it to run on smartphones and not have to depend on the cloud. Thus, you can potentially hack out all sorts of generic aspects that don’t seem relevant to the domain at hand (does AI need to know for example about Abraham Lincoln to dispense medical advice on say a particular disease?).
The downside is that the AI won’t be able to respond well to across-the-board prompts and could be seen as weaker than the larger-sized AI.
My way of depicting reinforcement fine-tuning is to say that RFT consists of five major steps:
Those five steps capture the essence of what needs to be undertaken for RFT. Variations exist that have six steps, seven steps, and even ten steps. My indicated five steps pretty much cover the gamut and do so in a tidy way.
One aspect that might have caught your eye is step #2, grader formation.
Allow me to elaborate on this.
I had already noted that the reinforcement process consists of telling the AI when it is right and when it is wrong, doing so during the RFT overall endeavor. Parlance amongst AI insiders is that the AI is being graded, almost like getting a letter grade in school.
An “A” grade in school means things went well. The dreaded “F” grade means the answers were incorrect. Instead of assigning letter grades during RFT, a numeric value is usually used. The common practice is to assign a score of zero for a wrong response, and a score of 1 for a response that is correct. Since not all answers will be completely right or completely wrong, a value between 0 and 1 is used to suggest how right or wrong the response was.
For example, go ahead and envision that I am data training a generic generative AI by using RFT. It is being tuned to the legal domain. I’ve fed in a bunch of legal content consisting of various laws, regulations, and so on. During the RFT process, I feed in a prompt asking the AI to decide whether a given legal clause is legally sound. The AI churns through the computational assessment and comes back with an answer that the clause is good to go.
If that was a correct answer, the grade given would be a 1, while if incorrect the grade would be a 0. But the world isn’t always quite so binary. Suppose the AI indicated that the clause is legally correct in certain circumstances but has loopholes in other circumstances. Perhaps that is a relatively fair answer, though in some ways correct and some ways incorrect. The grade given might be 0.60, suggesting that the response was mostly right (because it is assigned a score above 0.50 and inching toward a full 1.0), though it also was partially incorrect (thus it isn’t a full 1.0 and only given a score of 0.60).
How is the grading determined?
You could employ a human during the RFT that doles out grades. This is laborious, tends to be slow, and can be expensive. Generally, the grading component is usually some form of automation. It could be a specialized program that was developed for a particular domain. It could be a generic grading system that can be used across various domains. You can even use another generative AI as a grader, such as having a second generative AI standing there that does the grading during the RFT.
The bottom line is that the grader is vital and if you don’t get that setup properly, the rest of the RFT is going to be kaput.
I’ve got an important twist for you.
An ongoing assumption that is subject to heated debate is that the use of RFT will notably shine when the generative AI contains advanced AI features such as chain-of-thought reasoning (CoT), see my discussion about CoT at the link here.
Chain-of-thought refers to the conception that when the AI is trying to solve a problem or come up with an answer, the AI is instructed to perform a series of logical steps when doing so. If trying to diagnose a patient, the AI might first assess basic patient data such as age, weight, health, etc. The second step might be to examine medical tests like a blood test. The third step might be to then review what kinds of aliments seem to fit that patient. The fourth step might be to reach a medical diagnosis and explain how that diagnosis was determined.
Let’s bring RFT back into the picture.
A generative AI that leverages a chain of thought could be exercised and fine-tuned with reinforcement processes in the following way. We let the AI proceed trying to diagnose a patient based on data that we’ve collected for data training purposes. A particular chain-of-thought is derived. Great, that’s what we want to have happen.
It turns out that like the old saw, there are more ways than one to skin a cat (sorry, that’s a bit dour), we could have the AI take another shot at the diagnosis. The second time around the chain-of-thought might differ. We do this a third time and keep getting the AI to try out a wide variety of CoTs. For each of the attempts, we assign a grade to the derived answer, using whatever grader or grading system we’ve established.
What does this accomplish?
Aha, the hope is that by telling the AI which answers were right, and which were wrong, this also sheds light on which of the chain of thoughts were right and wrong. The AI is going to presumably mathematically begin to lean toward CoTs that are being rewarded and shift away from CoTs that are being penalized or disincentivized.
The act of this reinforcement fine-tuning is indirectly guiding the generative AI toward hopefully stronger and better chain-of-thought approaches and steering it from CoTs that aren’t as good.
If this is done well, we are not merely arriving at the right answers, we are also in a sense shaping the nature of the chain of thoughts that the AI is going to use. A cheeky way to express this is the famous adage that if you give a person a fish, you feed them for a day, but if you teach them how to fish, they will be fed for a lifetime.
Boom, drop the mic.
Previously, OpenAI had embraced the use of supervised fine-tuning (SFT), which I describe at the link here. SFT as adopted by OpenAI was mainly about tuning the AI tone and style of responses. That was handy. RFT is aimed at digging into specific domains and getting the AI up-to-speed on answering domain-specific prompts. It is a different angle on fine-tuning.
Both techniques have their particular aims.
OpenAI’s RFT is considered available only on a limited preview basis right now and will be more widely accessible sometime next year. Meanwhile, OpenAI has also indicated that they are earnestly seeking to identify ripe domains to use RFT on. AI researchers and domain experts who want to have ready access to the preview capability can submit their keen interest to OpenAI (see the OpenAI official log for details).
Here’s what OpenAI officially said about RFT in their formal announcement as noted in “OpenAI’s Reinforcement Fine-Tuning Research Program”, OpenAI blog, December 6, 2024 (excerpts):
If you are versed in a specific domain and believe that generative AI would be a boon, and if you are intrigued with RFT as a potential approach, you might want to consider putting your hat in the ring to make use of this latest OpenAI o1 model augmentation.
A final comment for the moment.
There is a fascinating twist upon the twist that I earlier brought to your attention. It goes like this. The prevailing approach of RFT is usually that the grades are only assigned based on the AI responses. My point is that the chain of thought is not being directly graded. The CoT is only indirectly being graded.
An interesting next step consists of grading the actual CoT and even pieces or slices of the CoT.
Let me frame this in human terms, cautiously so. Imagine that a student gives me their completed test and they were instructed to write down the logic for their answers on the test, immediately adjacent to each question. One means of grading would be to simply look at the answer and assign a grade. As a grader, I utterly ignore the logic the student has displayed.
Another form of grading would be to look at how they came up with the answer and assign a grade based on both the answer and the logic used.
Mull over that approach to grading.
Maybe that’s a lot better means of grading since the student will have some semblance of where or how their logic went awry. If they only know that the answer is merely right or wrong, they aren’t getting much feedback about how they arrived at the answer. You could persuasively argue that doing grading at a more granular level could significantly enhance their capabilities.
There are tradeoffs. The grader must do a lot more work. The grader has to be a lot better at grading since they are no longer simply comparing one answer against an answer key. Also, suppose the grader messes up and gives foul guidance about the logic that the student used. Oops, that could frazzle a student, and they are worse off than they were beforehand. Etc.
If we do proceed to further enhance RFT in that manner, should we refer to that as some kind of super RFT, perhaps noted as SRFT or SURFT?
You never know what nomenclature catches hold.
Let’s end with a famous proverb: “Learning is a treasure that will follow its owner everywhere.” I suppose we can say that this motto applies to humans and perhaps even applies to the advancement and future of AI.
Keep on learning.
Ya sea que se dé cuenta o no, la inteligencia artificial está en todas partes. Se encuentra detrás de los chatbots con los que hablas en línea, las listas de reproducción que transmites y los anuncios personalizados que aparecen en tu desplazamiento. Y ahora está tomando una personalidad más pública. Piense en Meta AI, que ahora está integrado en aplicaciones como Facebook, Messenger y WhatsApp; o Géminis de Google, trabajando en segundo plano en las plataformas de la compañía; o Apple Intelligence, lanzando a través de iPhones ahora.
AI tiene una larga historia, volviendo a una conferencia en Dartmouth en 1956 que primero discutió la inteligencia artificial como una cosa. Los hitos en el camino incluyen Eliza, esencialmente el primer chatbot, desarrollado en 1964 por el informático del MIT Joseph Weizenbaum y, saltando 40 años, cuando la función de autocompleta de Google apareció por primera vez en 2004.
Luego llegó 2022 y el ascenso de Chatgpt a la fama. Los desarrollos generativos de IA y los lanzamientos de productos se han acelerado rápidamente desde entonces, incluidos Google Bard (ahora Gemini), Microsoft Copilot, IBM Watsonx.ai y los modelos de LLAMA de código abierto de Meta.
Desglosemos qué es la IA generativa, cómo difiere de la inteligencia artificial “regular” y si la Generación AI puede estar a la altura de las expectativas.
En esencia, la IA generativa se refiere a sistemas de inteligencia artificial que están diseñados para producir un nuevo contenido basado en patrones y datos que han aprendido. En lugar de solo analizar números o predecir tendencias, estos sistemas generan salidas creativas como texto, música de imágenes, videos y código de software.
Algunas de las herramientas de IA generativas más populares en el mercado incluyen:
El principal entre sus habilidades, ChatGPT puede crear conversaciones o ensayos similares a los humanos basados en algunas indicaciones simples. Dall-E y MidJourney crean obras de arte detalladas a partir de una breve descripción, mientras que Adobe Firefly se centra en la edición y el diseño de imágenes.
No toda la IA es generativa. Si bien Gen AI se enfoca en crear contenido nuevo, la IA tradicional se destaca por analizar datos y hacer predicciones. Esto incluye tecnologías como el reconocimiento de imágenes y el texto predictivo. También se usa para soluciones novedosas en:
La IA que venció a los grandes campeones humanos en el ajedrez y el juego de mesa no fue una IA generativa.
Es posible que estos sistemas no sean tan llamativos como la Generación AI, pero la inteligencia artificial clásica es una gran parte de la tecnología en la que confiamos todos los días.
Detrás de la magia de la IA generativa hay modelos de idiomas grandes y técnicas avanzadas de aprendizaje automático. Estos sistemas están capacitados en grandes cantidades de datos, como bibliotecas completas de libros, millones de imágenes, años de música grabada y datos raspados de Internet.
Los desarrolladores de IA, desde gigantes tecnológicos hasta nuevas empresas, son conscientes de que la IA es tan buena como los datos que lo alimenta. Si se alimenta de datos de baja calidad, la IA puede producir resultados sesgados. Es algo con lo que incluso los jugadores más grandes en el campo, como Google, no han sido inmunes.
La IA aprende patrones, relaciones y estructuras dentro de estos datos durante el entrenamiento. Luego, cuando se le solicita, aplica ese conocimiento para generar algo nuevo. Por ejemplo, si le pide a una herramienta Gen AI que escriba un poema sobre el océano, no solo extrae versos preescritos de una base de datos. En cambio, está usando lo que aprendió sobre la poesía, los océanos y la estructura del lenguaje para crear una pieza completamente original.
Es impresionante, pero no es perfecto. A veces los resultados pueden sentirse un poco apagados. Tal vez la IA malinterpreta su solicitud, o se vuelve demasiado creativo de una manera que no esperaba. Puede proporcionar con confianza información completamente falsa, y depende de usted verificarla. Esas peculiaridades, a menudo llamadas alucinaciones, son parte de lo que hace que la IA generativa sea fascinante y frustrante.
Las capacidades generativas de IA están creciendo. Ahora puede comprender múltiples tipos de datos combinando tecnologías como el aprendizaje automático, el procesamiento del lenguaje natural y la visión por computadora. El resultado se llama IA multimodal que puede integrar alguna combinación de texto, imágenes, video y habla dentro de un solo marco, ofreciendo respuestas más contextualmente relevantes y precisas. El modo de voz avanzado de ChatGPT es un ejemplo, al igual que el proyecto Astra de Google.
No hay escasez de herramientas de IA generativas, cada una con su talento único. Estas herramientas han provocado la creatividad, pero también han planteado muchas preguntas además del sesgo y las alucinaciones, como, ¿quién posee los derechos del contenido generado por IA? O qué material es un juego justo o fuera de los límites para que las compañías de IA los usen para capacitar a sus modelos de idiomas; vea, por ejemplo, la demanda del New York Times contra Openai y Microsoft.
Otras preocupaciones, no son asuntos pequeños, implican privacidad, responsabilidad en la IA, los profundos profundos generados por IA y el desplazamiento laboral.
“Escribir, animación, fotografía, ilustración, diseño gráfico: las herramientas de IA ahora pueden manejar todo eso con una facilidad sorprendente. Pero eso no significa que estos roles desaparezcan. Simplemente puede significar que los creativos deberán mejorar y usar estas herramientas para amplificar su propio trabajo”, Fang Liu, profesor de la Universidad de Notre Dame Dame y Coeditor-Chief de las transacciones de ACM en las transacciones de Probabilista, contó el aprendizaje en el poderoso de la máquina probabilística, le dijo a Cetnet.
“También ofrece una forma para las personas que tal vez carecen de la habilidad, como alguien con una visión clara que no puede dibujar, pero que puede describirlo a través de un aviso. Así que no, no creo que interrumpa a la industria creativa. Con suerte, será una co-creación o un aumento, no un reemplazo”.
Otro problema es el impacto en el medio ambiente porque la capacitación de grandes modelos de IA utiliza mucha energía, lo que lleva a grandes huellas de carbono. El rápido ascenso de la Generación AI en los últimos años ha acelerado las preocupaciones sobre los riesgos de la IA en general. Los gobiernos están aumentando las regulaciones de IA para garantizar el desarrollo responsable y ético, especialmente la Ley de IA de la Unión Europea.
Muchas personas han interactuado con los chatbots en el servicio al cliente o han utilizado asistentes virtuales como Siri, Alexa y Google Assistant, que ahora están en la cúspide de convertirse en Gen AI Power Tools. Todo eso, junto con las aplicaciones para ChatGPT, Claude y otras herramientas nuevas, es poner ai en sus manos. Y la reacción pública a la IA generativa se ha mezclado. Muchos usuarios disfrutan de la conveniencia y la creatividad que ofrece, especialmente para cosas como escribir ayuda, creación de imágenes, soporte de tareas y productividad.
Mientras tanto, en la encuesta global de IA 2024 de McKinsey, el 65% de los encuestados dijo que sus organizaciones usan regularmente IA generativa, casi el doble de la cifra reportada solo 10 meses antes. Industrias como la atención médica y las finanzas están utilizando Gen AI para racionalizar las operaciones comerciales y automatizar tareas mundanas.
Como se mencionó, existen preocupaciones obvias sobre la ética, la transparencia, la pérdida de empleos y el potencial del mal uso de los datos personales. Esas son las principales críticas detrás de la resistencia a aceptar la IA generativa.
Y las personas que usan herramientas de IA generativas también encontrarán que los resultados aún no son lo suficientemente buenos para el tiempo. A pesar de los avances tecnológicos, la mayoría de las personas pueden reconocer si el contenido se ha creado utilizando Gen AI, ya sean artículos, imágenes o música.
AI ha secuestrado ciertas frases que siempre he usado, por lo que debo autocorrectar mi escritura a menudo porque puede parecer una IA. Muchos artículos escritos por AI contienen frases como “en la era de”, o todo es un “testimonio de” o un “tapiz de”. La IA carece de la emoción y la experiencia que viene, bueno, ser una vida humana y viviente. Como explicó un artista en Quora, “lo que AI hace no es lo mismo que el arte que evoluciona de un pensamiento en un cerebro humano” y “no se crea a partir de la pasión que se encuentra en un corazón humano”.
La IA generativa no es solo para técnicos o personas creativas. Una vez que obtienes la habilidad de darle indicaciones, tiene el potencial de hacer gran parte del trabajo preliminar por ti en una variedad de tareas diarias.
Digamos que está planeando un viaje. En lugar de desplazarse por páginas de resultados de búsqueda, le pide a un chatbot que planifique su itinerario. En cuestión de segundos, tiene un plan detallado adaptado a sus preferencias. (Ese es el ideal. Por favor, verifique siempre sus recomendaciones).
Un propietario de una pequeña empresa que necesita una campaña de marketing pero que no tiene un equipo de diseño puede usar una IA generativa para crear imágenes llamativas e incluso pedirle que sugiera copia publicitaria.
No ha habido un avance tecnológico que haya causado tal boom desde Internet y, más tarde, el iPhone. A pesar de sus desafíos, la IA generativa es innegablemente transformadora. Está haciendo que la creatividad sea más accesible, ayudando a las empresas a racionalizar los flujos de trabajo e incluso inspirar formas completamente nuevas de pensar y resolver problemas.
Pero quizás lo más emocionante es su potencial, y estamos rascando la superficie de lo que estas herramientas pueden hacer.
ChatGPT es probablemente el ejemplo más popular de IA generativa. Le das un aviso y puede generar texto e imágenes; Código de escritura; Responder preguntas; resumir el texto; borrador de correos electrónicos; y mucho más.
La IA generativa crea contenido nuevo como texto, imágenes o música, mientras que la IA tradicional analiza los datos, reconoce patrones o imágenes y hace predicciones (por ejemplo, en medicina, ciencia y finanzas).
Si busca “CHATGPT” en su navegador, es probable que se tope en sitios web que parecen estar alimentados por OpenAI, pero no lo son. Uno de esos sitios, chat.chatbotapp.ai, ofrece acceso a “GPT-3.5” de forma gratuita y utiliza marca familiar.
Pero aquí está la cosa: no está dirigida por OpenAi. Y, francamente, ¿por qué usar un GPT-3.5 potencialmente falso cuando puedes usar GPT-4O de forma gratuita en el actual ¿Sitio de chatgpt?
In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company’s valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself.
Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable—now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI’s arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever’s thinking. (Many of the sources in this piece requested anonymity in order to speak freely about OpenAI without fear of reprisal.) To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?
By then, Sutskever, who had previously dedicated most of his time to advancing AI capabilities, had started to focus half of his time on AI safety. He appeared to people around him as both boomer and doomer: more excited and afraid than ever before of what was to come. That day, during the meeting with the new researchers, he laid out a plan.
“Once we all get into the bunker—” he began, according to a researcher who was present.
“I’m sorry,” the researcher interrupted, “the bunker?”
“We’re definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI,” Sutskever replied. Such a powerful technology would surely become an object of intense desire for governments globally. The core scientists working on the technology would need to be protected. “Of course,” he added, “it’s going to be optional whether you want to get into the bunker.”
Two other sources I spoke with confirmed that Sutskever commonly mentioned such a bunker. “There is a group of people—Ilya being one of them—who believe that building AGI will bring about a rapture,” the researcher told me. “Literally, a rapture.” (Sutskever declined to comment.)
Sutskever’s fears about an all-powerful AI may seem extreme, but they are not altogether uncommon, nor were they particularly out of step with OpenAI’s general posture at the time. In May 2023, the company’s CEO, Sam Altman, co-signed an open letter describing the technology as a potential extinction risk—a narrative that has arguably helped OpenAI center itself and steer regulatory conversations. Yet the concerns about a coming apocalypse would also have to be balanced against OpenAI’s growing business: ChatGPT was a hit, and Altman wanted more.
When OpenAI was founded, the idea was to develop AGI for the benefit of humanity. To that end, the co-founders—who included Altman and Elon Musk—set the organization up as a nonprofit and pledged to share research with other institutions. Democratic participation in the technology’s development was a key principle, they agreed, hence the company’s name. But by the time I started covering the company in 2019, these ideals were eroding. OpenAI’s executives had realized that the path they wanted to take would demand extraordinary amounts of money. Both Musk and Altman tried to take over as CEO. Altman won out. Musk left the organization in early 2018 and took his money with him. To plug the hole, Altman reformulated OpenAI’s legal structure, creating a new “capped-profit” arm within the nonprofit to raise more capital.
Since then, I’ve tracked OpenAI’s evolution through interviews with more than 90 current and former employees, including executives and contractors. The company declined my repeated interview requests and questions over the course of working on my book about it, which this story is adapted from; it did not reply when I reached out one more time before the article was published. (OpenAI also has a corporate partnership with The Atlantic.)
OpenAI’s dueling cultures—the ambition to safely develop AGI, and the desire to grow a massive user base through new product launches—would explode toward the end of 2023. Gravely concerned about the direction Altman was taking the company, Sutskever would approach his fellow board of directors, along with his colleague Mira Murati, then OpenAI’s chief technology officer; the board would subsequently conclude the need to push the CEO out. What happened next—with Altman’s ouster and then reinstatement—rocked the tech industry. Yet since then, OpenAI and Sam Altman have become more central to world affairs. Last week, the company unveiled an “OpenAI for Countries” initiative that would allow OpenAI to play a key role in developing AI infrastructure outside of the United States. And Altman has become an ally to the Trump administration, appearing, for example, at an event with Saudi officials this week and onstage with the president in January to announce a $500 billion AI-computing-infrastructure project.
Altman’s brief ouster—and his ability to return and consolidate power—is now crucial history to understand the company’s position at this pivotal moment for the future of AI development. Details have been missing from previous reporting on this incident, including information that sheds light on Sutskever and Murati’s thinking and the response from the rank and file. Here, they are presented for the first time, according to accounts from more than a dozen people who were either directly involved or close to the people directly involved, as well as their contemporaneous notes, plus screenshots of Slack messages, emails, audio recordings, and other corroborating evidence.
The altruistic OpenAI is gone, if it ever existed. What future is the company building now?
Before ChatGPT, sources told me, Altman seemed generally energized. Now he often appeared exhausted. Propelled into megastardom, he was dealing with intensified scrutiny and an overwhelming travel schedule. Meanwhile, Google, Meta, Anthropic, Perplexity, and many others were all developing their own generative-AI products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot.
Many of Altman’s closest executives had long observed a particular pattern in his behavior: If two teams disagreed, he often agreed in private with each of their perspectives, which created confusion and bred mistrust among colleagues. Now Altman was also frequently bad-mouthing staffers behind their backs while pushing them to deploy products faster and faster. Team leads mirroring his behavior began to pit staff against one another. Sources told me that Greg Brockman, another of OpenAI’s co-founders and its president, added to the problems when he popped into projects and derailed long-standing plans with last-minute changes.
The environment within OpenAI was changing. Previously, Sutskever had tried to unite workers behind a common cause. Among employees, he had been known as a deep thinker and even something of a mystic, regularly speaking in spiritual terms. He wore shirts with animals on them to the office and painted them as well—a cuddly cat, cuddly alpacas, a cuddly fire-breathing dragon. One of his amateur paintings hung in the office, a trio of flowers blossoming in the shape of OpenAI’s logo, a symbol of what he always urged employees to build: “A plurality of humanity-loving AGIs.”
But by the middle of 2023—around the time he began speaking more regularly about the idea of a bunker—Sutskever was no longer just preoccupied by the possible cataclysmic shifts of AGI and superintelligence, according to sources familiar with his thinking. He was consumed by another anxiety: the erosion of his faith that OpenAI could even keep up its technical advancements to reach AGI, or bear that responsibility with Altman as its leader. Sutskever felt Altman’s pattern of behavior was undermining the two pillars of OpenAI’s mission, the sources said: It was slowing down research progress and eroding any chance at making sound AI-safety decisions.
Meanwhile, Murati was trying to manage the mess. She had always played translator and bridge to Altman. If he had adjustments to the company’s strategic direction, she was the implementer. If a team needed to push back against his decisions, she was their champion. When people grew frustrated with their inability to get a straight answer out of Altman, they sought her help. “She was the one getting stuff done,” a former colleague of hers told me. (Murati declined to comment.)
During the development of GPT‑4, Altman and Brockman’s dynamic had nearly led key people to quit, sources told me. Altman was also seemingly trying to circumvent safety processes for expediency. At one point, sources close to the situation said, he had told Murati that OpenAI’s legal team had cleared the latest model, GPT-4 Turbo, to skip review by the company’s Deployment Safety Board, or DSB—a committee of Microsoft and OpenAI representatives who evaluated whether OpenAI’s most powerful models were ready for release. But when Murati checked in with Jason Kwon, who oversaw the legal team, Kwon had no idea how Altman had gotten that impression.
In the summer, Murati attempted to give Altman detailed feedback on these issues, according to multiple sources. It didn’t work. The CEO iced her out, and it took weeks to thaw the relationship.
By fall, Sutskever and Murati both drew the same conclusion. They separately approached the three board members who were not OpenAI employees—Helen Toner, a director at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology; the roboticist Tasha McCauley; and one of Quora’s co-founders and its CEO, Adam D’Angelo—and raised concerns about Altman’s leadership. “I don’t think Sam is the guy who should have the finger on the button for AGI,” Sutskever said in one such meeting, according to notes I reviewed. “I don’t feel comfortable about Sam leading us to AGI,” Murati said in another, according to sources familiar with the conversation.
That Sutskever and Murati both felt this way had a huge effect on Toner, McCauley, and D’Angelo. For close to a year, they, too, had been processing their own grave concerns about Altman, according to sources familiar with their thinking. Among their many doubts, the three directors had discovered through a series of chance encounters that he had not been forthcoming with them about a range of issues, from a breach in the DSB’s protocols to the legal structure of OpenAI Startup Fund, a dealmaking vehicle that was meant to be under the company but that instead Altman owned himself.
If two of Altman’s most senior deputies were sounding the alarm on his leadership, the board had a serious problem. Sutskever and Murati were not the first to raise these kinds of issues, either. In total, the three directors had heard similar feedback over the years from at least five other people within one to two levels of Altman, the sources said. By the end of October, Toner, McCauley, and D’Angelo began to meet nearly daily on video calls, agreeing that Sutskever’s and Murati’s feedback about Altman, and Sutskever’s suggestion to fire him, warranted serious deliberation.
As they did so, Sutskever sent them long dossiers of documents and screenshots that he and Murati had gathered in tandem with examples of Altman’s behaviors. The screenshots showed at least two more senior leaders noting Altman’s tendency to skirt around or ignore processes, whether they’d been instituted for AI-safety reasons or to smooth company operations. This included, the directors learned, Altman’s apparent attempt to skip DSB review for GPT-4 Turbo.
By Saturday, November 11, the independent directors had made their decision. As Sutskever suggested, they would remove Altman and install Murati as interim CEO. On November 17, 2023, at about noon Pacific time, Sutskever fired Altman on a Google Meet with the three independent board members. Sutskever then told Brockman on another Google Meet that Brockman would no longer be on the board but would retain his role at the company. A public announcement went out immediately.
For a brief moment, OpenAI’s future was an open question. It might have taken a path away from aggressive commercialization and Altman. But this is not what happened.
After what had seemed like a few hours of calm and stability, including Murati having a productive conversation with Microsoft—at the time OpenAI’s largest financial backer—she had suddenly called the board members with a new problem. Altman and Brockman were telling everyone that Altman’s removal had been a coup by Sutskever, she said.
It hadn’t helped that, during a company all-hands to address employee questions, Sutskever had been completely ineffectual with his communication.
“Was there a specific incident that led to this?” Murati had read aloud from a list of employee questions, according to a recording I obtained of the meeting.
“Many of the questions in the document will be about the details,” Sutskever responded. “What, when, how, who, exactly. I wish I could go into the details. But I can’t.”
“Are we worried about the hostile takeover via coercive influence of the existing board members?” Sutskever read from another employee later.
“Hostile takeover?” Sutskever repeated, a new edge in his voice. “The OpenAI nonprofit board has acted entirely in accordance to its objective. It is not a hostile takeover. Not at all. I disagree with this question.”
Shortly thereafter, the remaining board, including Sutskever, confronted enraged leadership over a video call. Kwon, the chief strategy officer, and Anna Makanju, the vice president of global affairs, were leading the charge in rejecting the board’s characterization of Altman’s behavior as “not consistently candid,” according to sources present at the meeting. They demanded evidence to support the board’s decision, which the members felt they couldn’t provide without outing Murati, according to sources familiar with their thinking.
In rapid succession that day, Brockman quit in protest, followed by three other senior researchers. Through the evening, employees only got angrier, fueled by compounding problems: among them, a lack of clarity from the board about their reasons for firing Altman; a potential loss of a tender offer, which had given some the option to sell what could amount to millions of dollars’ worth of their equity; and a growing fear that the instability at the company could lead to its unraveling, which would squander so much promise and hard work.
Faced with the possibility of OpenAI falling apart, Sutskever’s resolve immediately started to crack. OpenAI was his baby, his life; its dissolution would destroy him. He began to plead with his fellow board members to reconsider their position on Altman.
Meanwhile, Murati’s interim position was being challenged. The conflagration within the company was also spreading to a growing circle of investors. Murati now was unwilling to explicitly throw her weight behind the board’s decision to fire Altman. Though her feedback had helped instigate it, she had not participated herself in the deliberations.
By Monday morning, the board had lost. Murati and Sutskever flipped sides. Altman would come back; there was no other way to save OpenAI.
I was already working on a book about OpenAI at the time, and in the weeks that followed the board crisis, friends, family, and media would ask me dozens of times: What did all this mean, if anything? To me, the drama highlighted one of the most urgent questions of our generation: How do we govern artificial intelligence? With AI on track to rewire a great many other crucial functions in society, that question is really asking: How do we ensure that we’ll make our future better, not worse?
The events of November 2023 illustrated in the clearest terms just how much a power struggle among a tiny handful of Silicon Valley elites is currently shaping the future of this technology. And the scorecard of this centralized approach to AI development is deeply troubling. OpenAI today has become everything that it said it would not be. It has turned into a nonprofit in name only, aggressively commercializing products such as ChatGPT and seeking historic valuations. It has grown ever more secretive, not only cutting off access to its own research but shifting norms across the industry to no longer share meaningful technical details about AI models. In the pursuit of an amorphous vision of progress, its aggressive push on the limits of scale has rewritten the rules for a new era of AI development. Now every tech giant is racing to out-scale one another, spending sums so astronomical that even they have scrambled to redistribute and consolidate their resources. What was once unprecedented has become the norm.
As a result, these AI companies have never been richer. In March, OpenAI raised $40 billion, the largest private tech-funding round on record, and hit a $300 billion valuation. Anthropic is valued at more than $60 billion. Near the end of last year, the six largest tech giants together had seen their market caps increase by more than $8 trillion after ChatGPT. At the same time, more and more doubts have risen about the true economic value of generative AI, including a growing body of studies that have shown that the technology is not translating into productivity gains for most workers, while it’s also eroding their critical thinking.
In a November Bloomberg article reviewing the generative-AI industry, the staff writers Parmy Olson and Carolyn Silverman summarized it succinctly. The data, they wrote, “raises an uncomfortable prospect: that this supposedly revolutionary technology might never deliver on its promise of broad economic transformation, but instead just concentrate more wealth at the top.”
Meanwhile, it’s not just a lack of productivity gains that many in the rest of the world are facing. The exploding human and material costs are settling onto wide swaths of society, especially the most vulnerable, people I met around the world, whether workers and rural residents in the global North or impoverished communities in the global South, all suffering new degrees of precarity. Workers in Kenya earned abysmal wages to filter out violence and hate speech from OpenAI’s technologies, including ChatGPT. Artists are being replaced by the very AI models that were built from their work without their consent or compensation. The journalism industry is atrophying as generative-AI technologies spawn heightened volumes of misinformation. Before our eyes, we’re seeing an ancient story repeat itself: Like empires of old, the new empires of AI are amassing extraordinary riches across space and time at great expense to everyone else.
To quell the rising concerns about generative AI’s present-day performance, Altman has trumpeted the future benefits of AGI ever louder. In a September 2024 blog post, he declared that the “Intelligence Age,” characterized by “massive prosperity,” would soon be upon us. At this point, AGI is largely rhetorical—a fantastical, all-purpose excuse for OpenAI to continue pushing for ever more wealth and power. Under the guise of a civilizing mission, the empire of AI is accelerating its global expansion and entrenching its power.
As for Sutskever and Murati, both parted ways with OpenAI after what employees now call “The Blip,” joining a long string of leaders who have left the organization after clashing with Altman. Like many of the others who failed to reshape OpenAI, the two did what has become the next-most-popular option: They each set up their own shops, to compete for the future of this technology.
This essay has been adapted from Karen Hao’s forthcoming book, Empire of AI.
By Karen Hao
*Illustration by Akshita Chandra / The Atlantic. Sources: Nathan Howard / Bloomberg / Getty; Jack Guez / AFP / Getty; Jon Kopaloff / Getty; Manuel Augusto Moreno / Getty; Yuichiro Chino / Getty.
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