00:00 to see Chris. You presumably had quite a busy weekend reviewing the material for your book,
00:05 haven't you? Because this is really all changing the AI world.
00:07 Yeah, torn up large chapters of the book and having to frantically rewrite them, although
00:13 seems like things are changing as we speak. So yes, this is a significant shift, I think,
00:18 in who controls the future of artificial intelligence. Open AI, obviously, for the last year has
00:24 dominated the space since the release of chat GPT almost a year ago to the day. Twenty twenty
00:30 two November was when this was first released. Now, it looks like large numbers of open eyes
00:36 employee base, as was mentioned by John, 500 and odd employees out of the 700 that work
00:42 at open. I have essentially threatened to walk and move to Microsoft, where they've
00:47 said they have an open offer to take up roles there to essentially build a new company.
00:52 And looks like Microsoft really has the control here, but is trying to juggle two masters
00:58 because they obviously have invested more than 10 billion dollars into open eye over
01:03 the last year. And so they've said they're continuing to work with them while also building
01:07 a competing product. I want to talk about what this means for the
01:11 companies in a moment. But first, I want you to explain to us really how big a figure in
01:15 the world of AI Sam Altman is. John called him a big deal. What does it mean for him
01:21 leaving open eye and joining Microsoft? It is pretty significant because he has a
01:26 sort of Godlike presence amongst his employees. The best example I can give for a kind of
01:33 parallel is Steve Jobs, who was formerly head honcho, the chief of Apple before he died
01:40 of cancer a few years ago. He kind of set the tone for the company, decided where it
01:47 was going to go, how it was going to invest, what the products look like. And Sam Altman
01:51 has managed to build up a similar cult of personality around many of his staff to the
01:56 extent that we really didn't know that there were these significant divides amongst some
02:01 of them until literally Friday. So, yeah, huge impact for him to disappear from the
02:07 company. And I think the fact that Microsoft has seemingly pretty much written a blank
02:12 check for him to be able to build what he wants there while also still funding the company
02:18 that he just left is an indication of quite how strong his gravitational pull is.
02:22 So what's the reason for this divide then? Is it that we're seeing a split between the
02:26 original idea behind AI that it would be open and free to use and the realisation that there's
02:31 actually serious money to be made out of it? Yeah, so it's still not fully clear why this
02:37 has happened. Part of the issue that we have is that OpenAI's board, which is a non-profit
02:43 entity set up in order to try and protect the original principles of OpenAI from when
02:48 it was founded back in 2015 as a sort of non-profit beneficial humanity developing project, haven't
02:57 actually said what's going on. But yes, you're right. There was a split in 2018 when Elon
03:02 Musk, who initially funded OpenAI, decided that he didn't like the direction the company
03:06 was going in, which was a more profit driven one. He withdrew his funding as a result,
03:11 OpenAI had to kind of reconfigure itself into this really difficult situation, which has
03:18 come to a head now where they have a for-profit company developing products that are being
03:22 sold and valued frankly at billions, $80 billion valuation for the company right now, while
03:28 also being overseen by a board whose main goal is to ensure the responsible development
03:34 of artificial intelligence. And those two things are coming up and butting against each
03:39 other as contrasting goals, and I think that's kind of what's caused the issue here.
03:43 Chris, good to talk to you. Thank you for joining us and good luck with the book. That's
03:48 Chris Stoker-Walker, the journalist and author.
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