OpenAI outs Sam Altman

So, in case you didn’t see the news, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI (the company that owns ChatGPT), has been voted off by the board.

Essentially, he’s been fired…

Here is the story: https://techcrunch.com/2023/11/17/sam-altman-is-out-as-openais-ceo/

Why was he fired?

This has yet to be answered.

But I am trying to put the tea leaves together and I have a theory that Anton Osika slightly confirmed me over on X.

There have been a few things that have happened over the last 2 weeks that is didn’t raise flags until Sam’s job kicked the proverbial can.

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November 6th, 2023

OpenAI devday commenced.

This is when the new turbo-charged GPT4 was announced. And I don’t know about you, but I haven’t even had time to look at those GPTs that people have been raving over.

Honestly, I don’t even have an active ChatGPT Pro subscription anymore since I use the API.

But one thing I want to point out here is that this was a BIG update for OpenAI once that could have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.

More on this later…

November 9th, 2023

Now, this is where things get interesting…

This is a weird one, right?

I mean, Microsoft invested tons of money into OpenAI just to say, “yeah, we better not use it for security risks.” If that was the case, why should we be using it?

November 15th, 2023

Two weeks before ChatGPTs history b-day, one of the fastest growing companies with about a $90 billion valuation says “No New SignUps”

Sam stated that it was due to a surge of usage that they couldn’t contend with.

Which is believable as they grew so fast so quickly only a short year ago. But they were able to handle it then; how come they can’t handle it now?

November 17th, 2023

Just a mere two days later, Altman is out with no warning whatsoever.

My Theory

The one thing that we need to contend with is privacy, and it has been in the limelight more now than it has ever been in the last year with Congress bringing in nearly all the major social networks.

Privacy is a legitimate concern as ChatGPT has been known to regurgitate whatever you tell it, even if that person is across the world.

Remember this article?

My theory is that there was a major security risk that was exposed by Microsoft. But it was fixed. No harm done…

Theeeeennnn…. the update to Turbo came out and what was most likely a patchwork fix was broken again. It likely was made worse.

Probably much worse.

It is so bad that the exploitation of it could only be stopped by turning off active revenue for OpenAI. That is a BIG problem.

It was so big that Altman had to fall on the sword for it.

Keep in mind, this is the man who essentially helped the company reach a near $100 billion valuation in less than a year, and they STILL asked him to leave.

The AI arms race is exploding and these corporations are building faster than it is safe to do. (Yes, Elon may have been right)

Usually, breaches go unannounced for months. Wal-Mart, Target, and Deloitte, all happened and weren’t made public for an average of 4-6 months later. (Deloitte was more than a year later).

How this affects marketers

If the Google recent HCU update tells us anything, we need to not have all of our eggs in one basket.

As great as ChatGPT is, it is a single point of failure.

I asked the Twitter-sphere what we would do if ChatGPT disappeared tomorrow and couldn’t get a good answer.

There are other LLMs out there like Claude, which is arguably better than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

But if you are anything like me, you likely have stopped spending so much money on content costs and shifted it to other growth measures since content has been come extremely cheap.

But if OpenAI gets turned off, will you be stuck? I sure hope not.

What I’m doing?

Business will continue as usual. I use the OpenAI API and Claude to create the majority of the content I’m putting on sites today.

But I have a built-in failsafe because I’m experienced in hiring writers.

If you have been lucky enough to live in a world where AI has been so plentiful, I recommend you come up with a contingency just in case.

Altman will be fine. I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon reaches out to him to help build up Grok.

Chat soon,

Chris Myles