OpenAI/MSFT drama in 2 minutes

PLUS: Plan B if OpenAI APIs go down

Author

Anita Kirkovska
November 20, 2023

Hi folks!👋🏻 This is The Prompt! Sorry for the delay today, but we had a busy weekend and a crazy day with all the OpenAI drama.

Today we have a shorter newsletter around the recent OpenAI events, and some backup plans for your apps in case the APIs go rogue.

Here’s what we have:

  • Everything that happened with OpenAI over the last 3 days

  • Resources to equip you with a plan B if OpenAI APIs go down

  • Survey to analyze user confidence in OpenAI (results will be shared)

FEATURED

The OpenAI / Microsoft drama

Here’s what happened over the weekend that felt like a year! The story is getting more complicated by the minute, so here’s the latest to keep you up to date:

Nov 16 - 18: Sam got fired, MSFT lost ~50B in market cap

  1. OpenAI fired Sam Altman due to “communication issues with the board”, saying that he was not completely candid with them. Nobody knows what that actually means, because we didn’t get an official statement of what actually happened. Bloomberg reports that Ilya didn’t like the “autonomous agent” option that Sam announced on Dev Day because those agents are a potential red flag for safety advocates.

  2. Then Greg Brockman, who co-founded OpenAI and who was the president of the board of directors also quit in solidarity

  3. Microsoft and other investors had no idea that this was happening. They also announced it right before the markets closed, so MSFT lost a good portion of market cap (~50B).

  4. The interim CEO is Mira at that point (previously CTO role), who actually tries to re-hire Sam and Greg back.

  5. On Saturday, Sam gave the OpenAI’s board a 5pm deadline to get to an agreement that they’ll leave the board, and bring him and Greg back to OpenAI

  6. On Sunday, many OpenAI employees showed their support for Sam saying he is the best guy for the job. This support propelled new discussions between Sam and the board, to bring him back with a new deadline by 5pm Sunday.

Nov 19: New OpenAI CEO & Microsoft brings Sam & Greg in-house

  1. The new CEO is Emmett Shear, previous co-founder of video streaming site Twitch

  2. Then, dozens of OpenAI employees started quitting OpenAI

  3. Sam who had 0% equity in OpenAI now works for the organization that owns 49% of OpenAI and will be able to use OpenAI’s proprietary tech (all models) to build a better and bigger AI project

  4. MSFT is the biggest winner here. They brought the wisest people in their team, while still owning a big chunk of OpenAI, with more to follow. Just 1 hour after they announced that Sam is joining MSFT, they added $115 billion (or 1.4 OpenAIs) worth of market cap.

  5. Initial leadership of the new venture is comprised of the top OpenAI researchers, the GTP-4 lead, 2 AGI researchers, Sam and Greg.

Nov 20: Almost the whole OpenAI team wants to quit, and Sam still wants to be the CEO

  • Up to now, about 700 out of 770 OpenAI employees has signed a letter saying that they might quit if Sam and Greg are not reinstated, and the board resigns.

  • Shortly after the letter was released, Ilya Sutskever joined that letter, saying on X: "I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.|” and Sam retweeted with bunch of hearts.

  • And now Sam apparently still wants to go back to OpenAI as CEO, as apparently the deal with MSFT wasn’t official.

What does this mean for you?

Their 10 million users, including us, are not currently affected by this situation. However, if this uncertainty causes their services to experience some downtime, we might be affected.So my advice to you is to keep up with the news, and follow as the story unfolds.

Their team is saying that they’re monitoring everything actively, and that there shouldn’t be any downtimes. But with everything that has happened so far, a plan B is not a bad option.

🚨 What else do you need now

Nothing else is important today, and I’m sharing more useful links below for founders/maker who are building on top of OpenAI’s platform.