The OpenAI saga definitely isn’t over. As reported first by The Information, then by Reuters, the company’s in-the-works enlarged board will not have any seats for main sponsor Microsoft, nor for other investors such as Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, or Thrive Capital.
When CEO Sam Altman was reinstalled last week after five days of tumultuous exile, The Verge reported that Microsoft—which owns 49% of the nonprofit’s profit-seeking subsidiary—and Altman both wanted seats on the enlarged board, which will apparently comprise nine people. Wanting isn’t the same as getting, though.
“Microsoft will have something to say about it, given the amount of money that they have put behind them,” Great Hill Capital chair Thomas Hayes told Reuters. No kidding, given the deeply unwelcome surprise that was the previous board’s firing of Altman—which, incidentally, still remains unexplained. Altman’s reinstatement largely returned OpenAI to stability, but Microsoft was surely hoping its $10 billion would give it protection from future surprises. “We will wait until the board officially says something,” added a spokesperson for Microsoft itself.
The Information reckons keeping investors off the board will signal the prioritization of safety over revenue, which would be in line with the thinking behind OpenAI’s founding purpose and weird corporate structure.
On one level, that would not be a bad thing—if you believe there’s a chance that artificial general intelligence will a) happen anytime soon and b) have the potential to threaten humanity, then OpenAI’s original incentives are surely worth holding on to. However, it would signal a continuation of the tension and uncertainty that led to the company’s crisis this month, which could annoy Microsoft but also, due to OpenAI’s ongoing need for Microsoft moolah, leave OpenAI’s customers wondering if they’re backing the right horse.
The company’s rivals aren’t missing out on the opportunity this uncertainty affords them. “You need not look any further than the events of the past 10 days to understand how there will not be one model to rule them all,” Amazon Web Services CEO Adam Selipsky told Wired ahead of yesterday’s announcement of Q, AWS’s business-oriented chatbot, which is powered by a variety of large language models from Cohere, Anthropic, and Amazon itself. (If OpenAI really is working on a new AI model code-named Q*, which reportedly may have played a role in Altman’s ouster, it should probably now choose a different name for the commercial launch.)
Interestingly, AWS uses some secret sauce to decide which underlying LLM should answer each query, unless the customer has explicitly chosen one. Selipsky said leaving the decision up to AWS is “more cost-efficient, but also flat-out more effective.”
Speaking of AWS and the announcements at its re:Invent conference yesterday, the company had quite a lot of big chip news. It unveiled new generations of its in-house processors for training neural networks (Trainium2) and running more traditional workloads (Graviton4), and extended its Nvidia partnership so AWS customers can tap into 32-strong bundles of team green’s shiny new GH200 Grace Hopper Superchips—AWS and Nvidia are even working together on designing the “world’s fastest GPU-powered AI supercomputer,” which will comprise a whopping 16,384 of those superchips, amounting to performance in the order of 65 exaflops.
Perhaps most intriguingly, AWS utility computing chief Peter DeSantis announced in his keynote that the Amazon unit has come up with a new quantum chip that’s very good at suppressing certain kinds of errors that have been holding back the quantum-computing field. Don’t expect the dawn of the quantum era just yet, though—we can all keep focusing on the chaotic AI revolution for now.
More news below. Also, check out the inaugural edition of Fortune’s new CEO Weekly Europe newsletter, which launched earlier today.
David Meyer
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NEWSWORTHY
Google ad placement. Google is placing major brands and politicians’ ads in all sorts of terrible places, from far-right sites to porn pages, according to a report by the ad-quality outfit Adalytics. TechCrunch was able to confirm some of Adalytics’ findings, though not all. Meanwhile, the anti-misinformation operation NewsGuard reports that programmatic ads from 86 major advertisers have been running next to viral posts that mislead X users about the Israel-Hamas war—and, thanks to X’s revenue-sharing program, funding those merchants of misinformation.
SpaceX buys Pioneer Aerospace. SpaceX is buying one of its vendors, the parachute maker Pioneer Aerospace, for $2.2 million. As The Information reports, Pioneer’s parent went bankrupt. This is SpaceX’s first acquisition in a couple years, unless there’s been one that wasn’t publicly reported.
New Apple censorship row. Following Apple’s contentious cancellation of Jon Stewart’s Apple TV+ show—reportedly over his insistence on covering issues around China and AI—the company has again become embroiled in a censorship row. This time, the issue is a speech that Robert De Niro gave at the Gotham Awards, in which he wanted to criticize Donald Trump. Variety reports that De Niro found the version on the teleprompter was shorn of that part because Apple wanted him to focus on the Apple-produced Killers of the Flower Moon, in which he starred. De Niro: “How dare they do that, actually.”
ON OUR FEED
“There are probably around 8 million bots running and managing most of the messaging on the internet, which is insane … You’re having a conversation on things, and the ones who push agendas are bots run by AI models, not humans anymore … And we are at version 0.1. We’re not even at version 1.0 of that. I think that 10 years from today, the human mind will be so heavily influenced by bots and by AI models that we can’t even imagine that.”
—Wix CEO Avishai Abrahami discusses the influence of AI on the web, in a very worthwhile Verge interview.
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
The UAE’s leading AI CEO addresses bombshell New York Times report alleging China ties, says he didn’t finish reading the story, by Nicholas Gordon
London’s iconic black cab drivers once resisted Uber with a passion. Now they’ll be available on the app, by Bloomberg
World’s first AI minister likens risk of overregulation to calligraphers that kept the printing press out of the Middle East for nearly 200 years, by Christiaan Hetzner
AI can be a game changer for neurodivergent employees, by Chris Stokel-Walker
Apple plans to end a credit card partnership with Goldman Sachs that it once touted as a blockbuster new business, by Bloomberg
BEFORE YOU GO
AI and copyright. In the U.S. and most other places, AI-generated works cannot currently be copyrighted, because that’s a right only given to works created by humans (see also: the infamous monkey selfie case). However, it looks like China may take a different view.
As flagged today by Hong Kong law professor Angela Zhang, the Beijing Internet Court yesterday ruled that AI-generated pictures meet the requirements of originality and intellectual investment—i.e., human prompts, parameter selection, and image selection—and can therefore be copyrighted by the human.
Zhang: “This decision aligns perfectly with my earlier forecast: China is adopting a pro-growth, business-friendly stance in its AI regulation.”
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