“We are a player in an ecosystem,” he says. “If you want to participate in this ecosystem in a way that is open, then this is the reciprocal trade that everybody’s interested in.” Without this trade, he says, the web begins to retract, to close — and that’s bad for OpenAI and everyone. “We do all this so the web can stay open.”
He alludes to the reciprocal social contract that has allowed us to find content for 30 years: I run a website on which I publish content. I allow search engines to crawl my site and to download and index the content I created. In return, I get traffic. For certain key words, the search engine will show a link, which people use to visit my site and enjoy its content. I can monetise those visits by placing advertisements on my site or selling other merchandise like T-shirts, or books, or mouse pads with my face on it.
But OpenAI’s participation on the Web isn’t reciprocal. OpenAI crawls my site and downloads and trains it’s models on the content I created. These models power their products. OpenAI sells access to their models via their API or advanced features on their chatbot. They use my content to make money. The difference to Google is that they don’t give me anything in return. They don’t link to my site. Nor do they pay to access the content I created.
Without the content OpensAI downloaded from the Web, most of it for free, their models would be useless, they wouldn’t have a product. OpenAI is leeching of people’s work and creativity. They are breaching the social contract of this open ecosystem.
As a result the Web might indeed retract. Not because us content publishers find ways to prevent OpenAI’s bots from accessing our websites. But because products like OpenAI’s flood the Web with machine-generated garbage drowning out human-made content. The Web will retract because of companies like OpenAI, not despite them.
— I’ve been away from the computer for a couple of days, so I’m trying to catch up on the events around OpenAI, which Gruber sums up nicely:
OpenAI named a new interim CEO, Twitch co-founder Emmett Shear. (Shear is an AI worrier, who has advocated drastically “slowing down”, writing “If we’re at a speed of 10 right now, a pause is reducing to 0. I think we should aim for a 1-2 instead.”) OpenAI CTO Mira Murati was CEO for about two days.
Satya Nadella announced very late Sunday night, “And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”
About 700 OpenAI employees, out of a total of 770, signed an open letter demanding the OpenAI board resign, and threatening to quit to join Altman at Microsoft if they don’t. Among the signees: Mira Murati (which might explain why she’s no longer interim CEO) and chief scientist and board member Ilya Sutskever.
Sutskever posted on Twitter/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.”
Nadella appeared on CNBC and admitted that Altman and Brockman were not officially signed as Microsoft employees yet, and when asked who would be OpenAI’s CEO tomorrow, laughed, because he didn’t know.
Some random thoughts on all this:
Remember how we all laughed at “Silicon Valley,” the TV show. I rewatched the show recently, and it struck me how realistic the absurd story lines are. Remember when Hooli CEO Belson “promotes” Jack Barker to work in the server basement, only for Barker to replace Belson a little later? Yeah, the shenanigans of around OpenAI would fit right into the show.
Unpopular opinion: The OpenAI board probably had good reasons to sack Altman. The OpenAI charter states: “We are concerned about late-stage AGI development becoming a competitive race without time for adequate safety precautions,” and Altman doesn’t share these concerns. Like many of his Silicon-Valley chums he’d rather move fast, break things, and have the industry regulate itself.
Microsoft CEO Nadella has worked the situation in his favour. When the dust settles, Altman will reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO or he has joined Microsoft. Either way, Nadella has Altman in his pocket: As a trustable minion at OpenAI or as a Microsoft employee stuffing more AI into Microsoft products.