AI and the importance of leadership
The big story in the tech world this week is OpenAI’s unexpected decision to sack one of its co-founders, the media-savvy Sam Altman, as CEO, replacing him on an interim basis with the company’s CTO, Mira Murati, an engineer of Albanian origin who had been with the company since 2018. Four hours after the announcement of Altman’s departure, Open AI’s president, Greg Brockman, stepped down, ushering in a total change of leadership for the company that manages well-known algorithms like OpenAI or Dall-E.
Hypotheses? At this point, rumors are rife. The reactions of both Altman and Brockman on Twitter make it clear they were as surprised by the move as anyone, while the OpenAI statement says Sam Altman “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board”, which obviously indicates a loss of confidence and a full-fledged defenestration.
Some observers have pointed to security issues that have been plaguing the deployment of OpenAI products: after the company’s last DevDay, where important features were announced that allow users to feed ChatGPT with their own information to create their own assistants, Microsoft, a key partner in OpenAI, cut off its employees’ access to ChatGPT due to concerns about security and confidentiality of information, a problem that had arisen previously. OpenAI then announced a pause to ChatGPT Plus registrations, which…
