Upping the ante on human-AI collaboration is happening right now as evidenced by latest OpenAI … [+]
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In today’s column, I examine the latest advancements in human-AI collaboration and explain how these amazing capabilities will materially impact your everyday use of generative AI and large language models (LLMs). To illustrate these advancements, I highlight the newly widely released OpenAI ChatGPT specialized add-in known as Canvas which has garnered a great deal of media attention, deservedly so.
A key takeaway is that if you haven’t heard about, seen, or used these innovative AI-based collaboration tools, you are in for quite a surprise. In some mind-bending respects, this might cause you to rethink your use of AI and gain a fresh perspective on what generative AI can achieve.
The bottom line is that it isn’t about what AI can do for you, but what you and AI can do together.
Let’s talk about it.
This analysis of an innovative AI breakthrough 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 coverage of the top-of-the-line ChatGPT o1 model and its advanced functionality, see the link here and the link here.
I’d like to start with the nature of human-to-human collaboration, after which we’ll shift to human-AI facets entailing collaboration.
When you collaborate with a fellow human, the overall notion is that you intend to work together to accomplish some kind of task or endeavor. For example, suppose you’ve drafted a memo at work and a co-worker has offered to review the draft with you. They are a handy second pair of eyes. The co-worker might spot some portions of your memo that could use rewording. Maybe the co-worker will identify missing content that ought to be added. Etc.
One means to collaborate on the review of the memo would be to go back and forth via email such that you email a first draft to them, the co-worker edits it and returns the revised draft to you, and so on. This series of cycles via email is bound to be somewhat sluggish and not the easiest or preferred way to do things. In a sense, it is very hard to have a proverbial “meeting of the minds” when you are emailing successive drafts to each other.
You’ve undoubtedly undertaken that kind of awkward and frustrating activity and realized by the school of hard knocks that it isn’t especially streamlined.
Sad face.
What would be a better form of collaboration?
Ideally, you’d like to do the review in real-time and allow each of you to immediately showcase on a referent draft the precise changes or issues you have with the writing. There would be one document that both of you have direct access to. Either one of you can highlight or point out passages that might require modification. Changes can be made quickly and visually evident to each of you. All eyes are seeing the same thing.
Voila, your collaboration becomes a true semblance of collaboration.
There are three main factors about this:
Happy face.
Shifting gears, let’s dive into the kind of human-AI collaboration that you experience in conventional generative AI. You will see in a moment how the above precepts come into play in an AI context. Hang in there.
Here’s a dialogue that you might typically have with any of the major generative AI apps.
That’s a rather common interaction when conversing with generative AI on a matter such as figuring out some possible edits for a drafted piece of content.
I have a question for you about the above dialogue.
Does the dialogue seem particularly conducive to acting collaboratively?
On the one hand, you could say that the generative AI is doing a useful job of offering insights into the draft. However, the person interacting with the AI must go back and forth about which line and which wording is at issue. Trying to proceed in this way is arduous and likely exasperating.
There must be a better way to accomplish this.
Suppose that we redid the interface that is involved in this human-AI collaboration.
Rather than a Q&A dialogue that is a sequence of back-and-forth iterations about something that is out of view, let’s open a second view or window that sits adjacent to the prevailing interaction. This second view will showcase the drafted memo. Thus, the person can see the draft and the AI can highlight which lines and which words are being discussed.
Furthermore, the view of the draft can be highlighted by the human, doing so to emphasize to the AI what portions the person wants the generative AI to focus on. Nice.
Let’s up the ante and allow the human and the AI to make changes directly on the draft memo. Either one can do so, freely, immediately, and with the attention of the other. The draft at this juncture is being displayed in the second view and persistently stays there as the dialogue between the human and the AI takes place.
Changes are immediately displayed. If the human makes a change, it is apparent what change was made because it is directly in the text, rather than cumbersomely describing the change that the user was thinking of making. Likewise, the AI can make a change in the draft, visually so, and the user sees exactly what change the AI was mentioning.
I hope that you can sufficiently envision what this new setup for human-AI collaboration looks like.
The premise is that whatever body of text that you and the AI are conversing about can be displayed in a second view, during which it is actively available for changes by either party. No longer do you need to waste time and effort trying to convey to the generative AI what you want to change, nor does the AI need to indirectly describe what the AI suggests being changed.
It is one editable view that is commonly shared by both.
Boom, drop the mic.
I realize that the idea of having a shared editable view for human-AI interaction seems at an initial consideration to be an obvious addition for generative AI. Some cynics are bound to exhort that this isn’t worth much of a hullabaloo.
Well, first of all, haters are going to hate. Secondly, yes, the approach of having a shared editable view is something that has been worked on in AI labs, but there hasn’t been that big of a commercial widespread availability of this kind of structure. Doing this at scale is a game changer.
When I say at scale, imagine that millions upon millions of people might end up using this type of human-AI interface.
How so?
OpenAI has now made available on a widespread basis their relatively new add-in known as Canvas and it works seamlessly with the widely and wildly popular ChatGPT. There are reportedly over 300 million weekly active users of ChatGPT. At this juncture, they will soon have or might already have Canvas available to them due to this expanded release (note that Canvas was available on a limited or beta basis for the last few months).
Canvas provides the second-view capability that I’ve been describing.
Your dialogue with ChatGPT sits to the left and the second view sits to the right.
The dialogue proceeds and meanwhile, the second view is jointly able to be explored and edited. Can you visualize in your mind’s eye what this looks like? I realize this might be hard to envisage in your head. Consider visiting the official OpenAI web page that shows how Canvas works or search on any reputable social media site for videos posted by people who have been making use of Canvas.
An interesting question is how many people will opt to use Canvas.
Some users of ChatGPT might not grasp what Canvas is or can do, therefore they won’t invoke it. Others might know that Canvas is there, but for various reasons don’t want to lean into it. This is one of those new pieces of functionality that will likely take time for people to get accustomed to using.
My prediction is that eventually, the use of a second-view approach will be commonplace for most generative AI apps. Users will expect it. Rather than the feature being a novelty, it will be a must-have piece of functionality. Indeed, other AI makers already have such capabilities in the works and like anything else in this highly competitive AI marketplace, every AI vendor will have to stay at the leading edge or fade into oblivion.
Expect too that variations and advancements in this type of capability are going to rapidly emerge. What kinds of amplifications? If two views are good, maybe allowing for three views is even better. Perhaps four views, five views, or as many as you like (some number of n-views). There will be a Darwinian process of variations proffered, some of which people will actively relish, and others that they won’t, ultimately winnowing to what people, by and large, want to have available.
There are fascinating behavioral ramifications. Allow me a moment to examine some aspects that maybe don’t immediately come to mind on this capability. Get ready to think outside the box.
Who should initiate the use of a shared editable view?
Your first thought might be that of course the human decides whether to engage the capability. Humans are supposed to be in charge of AI. Period, end of story.
Hold on for a moment.
Suppose a person using generative AI doesn’t perchance realize they could benefit by using a second-view collaborative feature. Maybe the idea of doing so doesn’t pop into their head. Or perhaps they are unfamiliar with the feature and don’t realize how it can help.
We might allow the generative AI to automatically initiate the second view. It goes like this. A user is carrying on a normal dialogue with AI. At some point, the person indicates they need to write a quick message to tell someone that foul weather is expected in their area. Based on that comment, the generative AI could discern that the user intends to write a message, which is a suitable circumstance for invoking the second-view capability.
Voila, the AI does so.
In the case of OpenAI’s Canvas, the AI researchers wrestled with this kind of automatic invoking of the capability. They have established their AI to do so but realize that users might get irked. How so? If the invoking happens too much, a user might become steamed and feel like the AI is overplaying its hand. A gentle touch is needed for the AI to discern how often to take such actions. This is one of those parameter-setting aspects.
Here’s another puzzler.
Suppose the generative AI examines a draft that is jointly being worked on with a user and computationally determines that the draft needs an utter overhaul. The draft as it sits currently is a mess and contains fragmented sentences, misspells, and otherwise is a piece of writing travesty.
Should the AI take the bull by the horns and summarily rewrite the entire draft?
You’ve certainly experienced this same aspect in real-life-based human-to-human collaborations. The person you are collaborating with announces in a loud voice that your draft is a pile of junk. They then grab it from you and proceed to rewrite the whole thing. You sit there, perhaps in mild shock, watching the other person opt to redo your hard work.
Admittedly, sometimes you are perfectly fine with the other person taking charge. One issue is that if this is supposed to be a learning experience, such as writing something for a class at school, numerous AI ethical questions arise, see my coverage at the link here.
OpenAI researchers did some handwringing on the same issue related to Canvas. How far should the AI go in doing a rewrite? Should the AI proceed on this or only if the user requests it? Even if the user requests the action, will it be the proper thing to do such that the AI has now essentially written the content rather than the human?
This is a heady matter that society in general is going to need to figure out, including whether new AI laws are needed to deal with these human-AI ethical dilemmas, see my discussion at the link here.
Changing to another angle on this, let’s brainstorm on how else a second-view capability could be utilized.
For those who write software, they probably already use some form of code editing tool that assists in composing and testing code. In that sense, they are familiar with a second-view approach. Few of those second-view capabilities do much in terms of actively devising and testing the code, and not often in a highly collaborative way (notice to trolls, yes, some tools will do so – I’m not saying that this doesn’t exist).
OpenAI has set up Canvas to enable software coding, which is in addition to performing collaborations on text composition such as writing memos, stories, essays, narratives, poems, and so on. The software side includes being able to run your code and having the AI examine testing results to then give suggestions on where bugs might be or otherwise make the code better.
An allied topic I’ve covered in other postings is whether we are headed toward the demise of software engineers as a profession, whereby AI does all needed coding from A to Z. The AI comes up with the code, tests it, and rolls it out. Away goes the job of human efforts of writing code and developing systems. Should you be worried if you are a programmer? See my analysis at the link here.
We are just in the early days of human-AI collaboration as it pertains to the use of generative AI and LLMs.
Imagine that you are using generative AI and have an article that you are writing. The article is to contain text, various figures, graphics, suitable images, and maybe have audio and video attached too. The use of a second-view or shall we say n-view is going to accommodate all modes or mediums. The AI isn’t going to only help with the text composition. All the components will be shown in some number of allied views, and you and the AI will work hand-in-hand to compose, edit, refine, and finalize it. For the latest on text-to-video, see my discussion at the link here.
The entire kit-and-kaboodle.
This seems quite exciting. And it is. Meanwhile, we need to ask hard questions about authorship, copyrights and Intellectual Property (IP) rights, plagiarism, and other bleaker sides of these AI advances.
We must keep from going over our skis, as they say these days.
A final remark for now.
Charles Darwin famously made this assertion about collaboration: “In the long history of humankind (and animal-kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” This suggests that we are smart to pursue human-AI collaboration. That is going to be our future, and there’s no turning back the clock.
Hopefully, we will be smart enough to keep human-AI collaboration in proper check and avert the dreaded existential risks that lurk within that weighty proposition. Should we collaboratively discuss this with AI, or might that be a bridge too far?
Time will tell.
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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