OpenAI Could Face Backlash in 2024

Hey Everyone,

Not everything is okay in the dark alleys of venture capital politics and BigTech’s impressive plans to steer Generative A.I. in their favor. It's monopoly Capitalism at its finest with a near guarantee that it won't have a great outcome for humanity.

Silicon Valley has sought to control the power of LLMs for their own profit, and nobody quite like OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023.

?? From our sponsor: ??

Always scrambling to tackle urgent work? ??

Work faster than ever with ClickUp AI:

?? Supercharge your writing and creativity

?? Choose from 100+ use cases tailored to specific roles

?? Generate action items from Docs and conversations

... and so much more! ??

Get started today!

OpenAI even invested in one of Sam Altman's projects. In covering the drama at OpenAI there's been so many red flags that have come out. The odds are that in 2024, OpenAI customers and talent are going to flee to better options.

The firing of Sam Altman and his return giving Microsoft even more power at OpenAI, has a dark side. In fact the counter-coup allowing him to return has produced some measure of shade on the reputation of OpenAI.

Sam Altman might be Time CEO of the year but it comes with a cost. It comes with more scrutiny on his misconduct with those he deemed not allies at OpenAI. Former employees of OpenAI are speaking out.

Meanwhile Microsoft Azure is hinting that relying too much on OpenAI might also be a B2B liability.

Eric Boyd, the Microsoft executive responsible for the company’s AI platform, suggested in an interview Wednesday that the company’s AI service will soon offer more LLMs beyond OpenAI, acknowledging that customers want to have choice. . Boyd’s hint that more LLMs are coming follow Amazon AWS CEO Adam Selipsky’s veiled criticism of Microsoft last week, in which Selipsky said companies “don’t want a cloud provider that’s beholden primarily to one model provider.”

So while OpenAI’s reputation becomes more problematic and Amazon and Google are improving their Cloud AI offerings and Generative A.I. partnerships and vendor rosters, Microsoft going all-in on OpenAI is not looking so genius a few months later. But, it actually gets worse. And I’m just scratching the surface here.

So how could this story get worse? Recently it came to light in mid December, 2023 that the UK's competition regulator wants to know if recent changes at OpenAI and its evolving relationship with Microsoft are cause for concern.

The competition and Markets Authority (CMA) is asking interested parties to comment on whether the "partnership" between the two tech vendors, "including recent events" equates to a "relevant merger situation" – the sort the CMA inspects – and if so, how that has influenced competition.

Anthropic, which spun out of OpenAI was forced to partner with Google and Amazon just to keep up and its created an AI arms race around the funding of foundational models even as open-source options have created a workaround and led to many more focused niche LLM startups.

Generative A.I. is like a “big bang moment” that’s creating divergence and foul play around an AI arms race for AI Supremacy.

New reports paint the OpenAI CEO as a manipulative liar who liked to go behind peoples backs.

I think many of us already understood that you don't get to where Sam Altman is by playing nice with competitors and ideologically different members of OpenAI internally. The history of conflict at this startup is off the charts!

Sam Altman’s reputation is nothing to write home about and it should be a growing cause for concern of Microsoft. You don’t want potential customers leaving you because of the poor reputation of OpenAI in privacy, safety and poor conduct between its leadership and the board, and its own original mandate. Not to mention the treatment of employees if you disagree with Sam Altman.

One of the most dramatic blowups in Silicon Valley is still a mystery as even Helen Toner herself disgraced and fired from the board isn’t going into much detail. However one thing is clear, the women of OpenAI’s board are long gone and Microsoft has consolidated even more power.

I knew right away when Microsoft plowed $10 Billion into OpenAI that this had the makings of a major future anticompetitive investigation. Now in 2024 it’s looking likely that Microsoft Corp.’s partnership with OpenAI Inc. is facing the potential of a full-blown UK antitrust investigation three weeks after a mutiny at the ChatGPT creator laid bare deep ties between the two companies.?

The? two companies have sought to telegraph their independence, but it’s not clear regulators will buy the argument. Their entire deal is shady from an antitrust perspective.

Read the Full Story here.