OpenAI is one of the leaders in this AI boom or AI spring. It has been a roller coaster ride for this company, originally founded in December 2015. Most of you would know that Elon Musk was one of the founders. Few years later, Elon Musk resigned from the OpenAI Board of Directors seat. An OpenAI blog post mentioned about a possible conflict of interest in the future with Tesla’s AI advancements. Fair enough. Then came the GPT-2 announcement in February 2019, GPT-3 in 2020, DALL-E in 2021 and in December 2022, they had launched a free preview of GPT 3.5.

In a dramatic turn of events, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman were ousted from their own company. Man! That must have hurt. I guess, there were some negotiations later that didn’t work out. And then 738 of OpenAI’s 770 employees, including Mira Murati (CTO) and Illya Sutskever, signed an open letter stating that they would quit their jobs and join Microsoft if the board did not rehire.

I am wondering about those 32 (770-738) employees, are still working there? Because fast forward to recent developments, the ousted founders are back, and just few days back on May 13^th, OpenAI introduced the GPT-4o.

But it is still too early to say “and they lived happily ever after”.

Hold on! I am getting there. Few days back Illya Sutskever resigned. He seems to have full faith in the AGI that the OpenAI will build and it would be safe and beneficial under the leadership of Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Mira Murati, and Jakub Pachocki. For those wondering, AGI stands for Artificial General Intelligence. Altman describes it in an interview as a median human that you could hire as a co-worker and it could do anything which a remote co-worker would do behind the computer. One of its skills is to figure out and decide to go good at whatever you need.

He even posted a picture of his team. Aww. Also, he is excited for his new project, details of which he would share later. Hours later, Jan Leike, posted on X, saying “I resigned”.  In one of the tweets, he mentioned that he joined OpenAI thinking it would be the best place to do the research, but he has now reached a breaking point and disagree with the views of OpenAI leadership. He also wrote that OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI company. Altman, thanked them for their contributions and announced that he would post a longer message in the next couple of days.

On May 17^th, CNBC reported that OpenAI has disbanded its team that focused on AI risks. This team was only formed last year. Well, reshuffling and reorganizing are part of business as companies start grow bigger and bigger. Whether it will be for better or worse can only be seen in the coming days. OpenAI does seem optimistic, though. Let’s see.