The man who would be king

Not that I'm an investor or know a great deal about AI, but it has been interesting to follow the events surrounding OpenAI the past two weeks.  Like many, I didn't know anything about the research organization until Sam Altman was dismissed shortly after launching customized versions of ChatGPT, making AI accessible to virtually anyone curious as to what it can do.  

There was already a lot of consternation over such products as they could do everything from write songs, to movie scripts to books based on a vast database culled from the internet.  All kinds of alarms were being sounded.  Nothing was sacred.  Certainly not whatever personal information you had on the web.  Mostly we heard from screenwriters, musicians and novelists who felt their work was being openly plagiarized and that there was little they could do about it.

Enter Elon Musk in an effort to save the day.  He seemed to be the one pulling the strings at OpenAI that led to Altman's ouster.  The two had initially been friends but Musk left the organization some years ago in a huff when he couldn't get his way, only to watch the company grow into a $29 billion IT behemoth largely controlled by Microsoft, which was investing heavily in it.  OpenAI was no longer the little non-profit but a "capped for profit" company, which meant it could draw investors far and wide and tap the best AI engineers, paying them fabulous salaries.  Elon thought that OpenAI had lost its way and that if he or a surrogate like Ilya Sutskever led the company he could steer it back on the right track, mostly providing valuable information for his own fledgling AI effort.  

Well, Sutskever apparently had serious misgivings and organized a massive walkout if Altman wasn't brought back as CEO.  I think he probably saw what Musk did to Twitter and imagined the same thing happening at OpenAI.  So Musk is once again sounding the alarm against unfettered AI after having failed at what appeared to be nothing more than a hostile takeover attempt.

It seems Musk seriously misjudged how much stake Microsoft had in this company and how much more money they are willing to throw behind it with Altman and Brockman back at the helm.  No sooner were these two "fired" than Microsoft offered them a job with 738 of 770 OpenAI employees in tow, including Sutskever.  This is what happens when you butt heads with the big boys.  Musk may be big but his companies fall short of Microsoft's whopping $2.45 trillion market cap.

Yes, I'm gleaning a lot of this from wikipedia because magazines like Fortune, which has been running an endless stream of articles on my facebook timeline, are subscription only.  This is how Musk would like to make X, seemingly unable to grasp that this greatly reduces the traffic on his site.  Of course, there are many other places to turn like The Guardian, which has also been following the ongoing saga.

What worries me about this is how IT has become a virtually unregulated industry that accounts for trillions of dollars in capital with little or no accountability.  Elon Musk is currently top dog.  He is essentially a man with no country but has a far reaching influence thanks to X, Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink.  He arranges meetings with world leaders and thinks he has the inside track on every world crisis, most recently the battle over Gaza.  

The problem is that he has no real interest in helping to solve these crises but rather uses them to draw attention away from the more unsavory aspects of his character.  This latest publicity stunt in Israel was nothing more than a way to cover over the charges of antisemitism that have been leveled against his social media site X by Media Matters.

I find this to be a real concern when he talks about using his new AI company, Grok, as a chatbot for deep learning, especially given he "modelled" the concept after a farcical series of books by Douglas Adams.  Grok currently has access to everything on X and no doubt Musk wants to expand its insatiable appetite.  By gaining access to other open source technology, inside information with world leaders and god knows what else, it won't be long before Grok swallows the whole world.  Musk uses comedy to mask his far more sinister side that would love nothing more than to rule the world.

OpenAI seemed like an easy target until Microsoft stepped in.  Of course the people behind Microsoft aren't great guys either.  They are just protecting their interests.  This is where world leaders need to step in and start regulating the IT industry before it is too late.  It may already be too late as far as we know.