‘The artificial intelligence schism is consumed’

NOTo need for Netflix or HBO. Silicon Valley has fallen in love with a show that is up there with the medieval saga Game of Thrones or the more business-oriented Succession – who’s going to take over daddy’s conglomerate? All weekend long, the soap opera was the subject of live commentary by tech figures, back on X, which has suddenly reverted to Twitter, the platform that makes the news.

Read more Article reserved for our subscribers ‘On artificial intelligence, the opposition between pessimists and optimists is simplistic, even dangerous’

At the heart of the plot is an OpenAI start-up. Launched in 2017 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and a few others, OpenAI is behind ChatGPT, the conversational robot that precipitated an arms race between tech giants worthy of the early days of the internet.

Hero of the story, Sam Altman, 38 years old, in search of the “economy of abundance” promised by AI. Altman grew up in Missouri, not the most techno place in the US, but by the age of eight he’d already disassembled a Macintosh computer and by 25 he was a multimillionaire. In the debate between the “doomers” – AI is going to kill us all – and the techno-optimists, in favor of keeping ChatGPT’s engine running at full speed, he describes himself as a “centrist.”

A man who’s betraying the mission

The antihero is Ilya Sutskever, 37, co-founder of OpenAI. The dark genius of deep learning, he was born in the USSR and emigrated to Israel, then Canada. An overachiever who took university courses as early as the 4^th rank in Jerusalem. At the University of Toronto, he joined the team of Britain’s Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneer of neural networks. The 75-year-old Hinton resigned from Google in May, noting that AI has the potential to set itself goals that are different from the ones originally set for it. Sutskever, too, is said to be in the throes of existential questioning – “an Oppenheimer moment,” is how internet users described it, referring to Christopher Nolan’s film on the trials and tribulations of the father of the atomic bomb.

Season 1. On Friday, November 17, the OpenAI board of directors announced that it had dismissed Altman. The AI ​​globetrotter was faulted for not being “candid” in his conversations with the board. Twitter is abuzz with speculation. Whose crime is it? Sutskever invited Altman to a video conference on Google Meet. He criticized him for betraying his sacred mission, to build an AI that benefits all humanity. Between two appalled tweets, internet users laughed out loud: “Microsoft has invested 10 billion in OpenAI and they hold their conferences on Google Meet?”

The man who’s ‘pressing the panic button’

The next day, a new twist. Altman negotiates his return to OpenAI. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is furious about his dismissal, and investors are putting pressure on him. The majority of the management team is ready to resign if he is not recalled. Altman posts a tweet proclaiming his “love for the OpenAI team.” More than a hundred employees repost the message, accompanied by a red, blue or purple heart. “OpenAI is pivoting towards a mass entertainment business,” ironized Google researcher François Chollet.

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