Pyou need Netflix or HBO. Silicon Valley has fallen in love with a show that has nothing to envy of the series Game Of Thronesthe medieval saga, or Succession, more mercantile – who will take over dad’s conglomerate? All weekend, the soap opera was commented on live by tech figures, back on X, suddenly once again becoming Twitter, the platform that makes the news.
At the heart of the intrigue: the start-up OpenAI. Launched in 2017 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk and a few others, OpenAI is behind ChatGPT, the chatbot that precipitated an arms race worthy of the early days of the Internet between tech giants.
Hero of history, Sam Altman38 years old, looks like a Little Prince in search of “the economy of abundance” promised by AI. Sam grew up in Missouri, not the most tech-savvy place in America, but by age 8 he had already taken apart a Macintosh, and by 25 he was a multimillionaire. In the debate between “doomers” catastrophizing – AI will kill us all – and the “techno-optimists”, supporters of continuing to run the engine of ChatGPT at full speed, he describes himself as a “ centrist “.
The one who betrays the mission
Antihero: Ilya Sutskever, 37, co-founder of OpenAI. The dark genius of deep learning, born in the USSR (at the time), emigrated to Israel, then to Canada. A gifted person who takes university courses from 4th gradee, in Jerusalem. At the University of Toronto, he joined the team of Briton Geoffrey Hinton, the pioneer of neural networks. artificial. At 75 years old, this one resigned from Google in May. The AI has “the potential to set goals that are not aligned with those we designate”he worries in the New Yorker from November 20. Ilya Sutskever would also be prey to existential questioning – “an Oppenheimer moment”summarize Internet users, none of whom missed Christopher Nolan’s film on the horrors of the father of the atomic bomb.
Season 1. Friday November 17, OpenAI Board of Directors Announces Removal of Sam Altman. The AI globetrotter made the mistake of having lacked “franchise” in his conversations with the board. Twitter is on fire, speculating. Who benefits from the crime? Ilya Sutskever invited Sam for a video conference on Google Meet. He criticized him for betraying the sacred mission: “ VSbuild AI that benefits all humanity. » Between two startled tweets, Internet users laugh: “Microsoft invested 10 billion in OpenAI and they do their conferences on Google Meet? »
You have 40% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.