Sam Altman and Open AI

The news came down yesterday that Sam Altman was no longer part of Open AI at Microsoft. Still waiting for the complete story to come our but I could help but think of how Open AI was founded by Sam Altman and Elon Mush as an open operating system to combat Google's entry into the field.

Altman and Musk later had a falling out with Elon leaving the company to Alman's control. Altman then made Chat GPT  a for profit product and sold the company for billions to Microsoft. From Walter Isaacson's excellent book Elon Musk:

Instead, Musk unleashed a barrage of attacks on Open AI and Altman. "Open AI was created as an open-source (which is why I named it Open AI), non-profit company to serve as a counterweight to to Google, but now it has become a closed source, maximum-profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft," he said. "I'm still confused as to how a non-profit to which I donated $100M somehow became a $30B market cap for-profit. If this is legal, why doesn't everyone do it?" He called AI "the most powerful tool that mankind ever created," and then lamented that it was "now in the hands of a ruthless corporate monopoly,"

Yesterday Altman found out just how ruthless. Still waiting for the full story to come out but this is not good news for mankind.