Turmoil at OpenAI: what’s next for the creator of ChatGPT?

Nearly two years ago, OpenAI said that artificial general intelligence, or AGI — the thing the company was created to build — could “elevate humanity” and “give everyone incredible new capabilities.”

Now, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is trying to lower expectations.

As OpenAI was ironing out a new deal with Microsoft in 2016 — one that would nab the young startup critical compute to build what would become ChatGPT — Sam Altman needed the blessing of his biggest investor, Elon Musk.

“$60MM of compute for $10MM, and input from us on what they deploy in the cloud,” Altman messaged Musk in September 2016, according to newly revealed emails. Microsoft wanted OpenAI to provide feedback on and promote (in tech circles, “evangelize”) Microsoft AI tools like Azure Batch. Musk hated the idea, saying it made him “feel nauseous.” 

Microsoft is getting ready to host OpenAI’s next model, just as reports emerge describing unprecedented tension in their complex relationship.

We just exclusively revealed that Orion, OpenAI’s next model, is set to be released by the end of the year. A source familiar with Microsoft’s AI plans tell me that engineers inside the company have been preparing to host OpenAI’s Orion model in recent weeks.

OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December, The Verge has learned.

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Miles Brundage, OpenAI’s senior adviser for the readiness of AGI (aka human-level artificial intelligence), delivered a stark warning as he announced his departure on Wednesday: no one is prepared for artificial general intelligence, including OpenAI itself.

“Neither OpenAI nor any other frontier lab is ready [for AGI], and the world is also not ready,” wrote Brundage, who spent six years helping to shape the company’s AI safety initiatives. “To be clear, I don’t think this is a controversial statement among OpenAI’s leadership, and notably, that’s a different question from whether the company and the world are on track to be ready at the relevant time.”

Here’s the thing about asking investors for money: they want to see returns.

OpenAI launched with a famously altruistic mission: to help humanity by developing artificial general intelligence. But along the way, it became one of the best-funded companies in Silicon Valley. Now, the tension between those two facts is coming to a head. 

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is leaving the company.

“I’m stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration,” she wrote in a post on X. “For now, my primary focus is doing everything in my power to ensure a smooth transition, maintaining the momentum we’ve built.”

Jony Ive has confirmed that he’s working with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on an AI hardware project. The confirmation came today as part of a profile of Ive in The New York Times, nearly a year after the possibility of a collaboration between Altman and the longtime Apple designer was first reported on.

There aren’t a lot of details on the project. Ive reportedly met Altman through Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, and the venture is being funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ company. The Times reports it could raise $1 billion in funding by the end of the year but makes no mention of Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank CEO rumored last year to have invested $1 billion in the project.

The huge leaps in OpenAI’s GPT model probably came from sucking down the entire written web. That includes entire archives of major publishers such as Axel Springer, Condé Nast, and The Associated Press — without their permission. But for some reason, OpenAI has announced deals with many of these conglomerates anyway.

At first glance, this doesn’t entirely make sense. Why would OpenAI pay for something it already had? And why would publishers, some of whom are lawsuit-style angry about their work being stolen, agree?

OpenAI says that more than 200 million people use ChatGPT each week, as first reported by Axios. OpenAI spokesperson Taya Christianson confirmed the number to The Verge, which is now double the 100 million weekly active users OpenAI reported last November.

Additionally, Christianson says that 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI’s products, while API usage has doubled following the release of the company’s cheaper and smarter model GPT-4o Mini.

Elon Musk has revived his complaint against OpenAI after dropping a previous lawsuit, again alleging that the ChatGPT maker and two of its founders — Sam Altman and Greg Brockman — breached the company’s founding mission to develop artificial intelligence technology to benefit humanity.

The new lawsuit filed in federal court in Northern California on Monday says that Altman and Brockman “assiduously manipulated Musk into co-founding their spurious non-profit venture” by promising that OpenAI would be safer and more transparent than profit-driven alternatives. The suit claims that assurances about OpenAI’s nonprofit structure were “the hook for Altman’s long con.”

Microsoft has dropped its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI, less than eight months after securing the non-voting seat. Apple was reportedly planning to join OpenAI’s nonprofit board, but now the Financial Times reports that Apple will no longer join the board.

OpenAI confirmed that Microsoft has given up its seat in a statement to The Verge, following reports from Axios and the Financial Times that Microsoft’s deputy general counsel Keith Dolliver wrote a letter to OpenAI late on Tuesday.

Apple has chosen App Store chief and former marketing head Phil Schiller to represent the company on OpenAI’s nonprofit board, according to a report from Bloomberg. Schiller will reportedly get an observer role, meaning he can attend board meetings but can’t vote or act as a director.

Joining the board will allow Schiller to learn more about the inner workings of OpenAI as Apple works to build ChatGPT into iOS and macOS later this year. The integration will allow the AI-supercharged Siri to punt more advanced queries to ChatGPT if users grant permission. As previously reported by Bloomberg, no money is currently involved in the partnership, though Apple is expected to get a percentage of ChatGPT subscriptions made through its platforms down the road.

OpenAI has appointed Paul M. Nakasone, a retired general of the US Army and a former head of the National Security Agency (NSA), to its board of directors, the company announced on Thursday.

Nakasone, who was nominated to lead the NSA by former President Donald Trump, directed the agency from 2018 until February of this year. Before Nakasone left the NSA, he wrote an op-ed supporting the renewal of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the surveillance program that was ultimately reauthorized by Congress in April.

Elon Musk has dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing the company of a breach of contract and allegedly abandoning its mission of creating AI technology to benefit humanity. As reported earlier by CNBC, the case was dismissed without prejudice, meaning Musk can file it again.

Musk’s decision to withdraw the lawsuit, filed in a California state court in February (case number CGC24612746), comes just one day before a scheduled hearing where the judge would’ve reviewed OpenAI’s request to dismiss the case. It’s also one day after Musk said he would ban Apple devices at his companies if the company integrates OpenAI’s technology into the iPhone and Mac “at the OS level,” among other bizarre threats.

On November 17th, 2023, OpenAI’s board shocked everyone by suddenly ousting co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.

He had been overseeing one of the fastest-growing app launches in history with ChatGPT, so what happened? Former board member Helen Toner is filling in blank spaces in an interview on The TED AI Show podcast, providing her perspective on the events that caused board members to stop trusting Altman as well as how he eventually returned.

OpenAI is forming a new safety team, and it’s led by CEO Sam Altman, along with board members Adam D’Angelo and Nicole Seligman. The committee will make recommendations on “critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations” — a concern several key AI researchers shared when leaving the company this month.

For its first task, the new team will “evaluate and further develop OpenAI’s processes and safeguards.” It will then present its findings to OpenAI’s board, which all three of the safety team’s leaders have a seat on. The board will then decide how to implement the safety team’s recommendations.