Weekend Warp

I could do this edition of Weekend Warp dedicated only to Sam Altman ??, but let me restrict myself to one top news about him: Altman is back where he belongs – the Board of OpenAI . Some of you might recall the secretive and sordid saga where over a period of 30 minutes the OpenAI Board blindsided Altman, cofounder Greg Brockman and the mighty Satya Nadella by ousting Altman as the CEO and appointing Mira Murati as the interim CEO. With the backing of almost all of OpenAI’s employees, including Murati and detractor Ilya Sutskever , Sam was soon back as the CEO. However, the new Board appointed law firm WilmerHale to investigate the whole affair. The firm did find that there was “a breakdown in trust” precipitated Altman’s removal by the prior board and that his earlier conduct “did not mandate removal.” So, he is back, and there are three new Board members, all women (perhaps to celebrate the day of the announcement, which was Women’s Day): Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann , former CEO of the Gates Foundation ; Nicole Seligman, a former Sony general counsel; and Fidji Simo , the CEO and chair of grocery delivery company Instacart and a former Facebook executive.

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Coming up next is another sordid saga – about Elon Musk and OpenAI. We all know that Musk sued OpenAI last to last week, but this week OpenAI came out publicly with some rather embarrassing revelations about Musk. OK, I did promise only one story about Sam Altman, but this one is strictly about OpenAI and not Altman??. Well, after Musk accused OpenAI for not remaining ‘open’ and deviating from its original mission by “selling out” to Microsoft, among others, OpenAI’s revelations in a blog published by the main cofounders (including Ilya Sutskever), had some damning revelations that Musk himself had pushed them to take more money, and also that he wanted them to become a part of Tesla , with Musk becoming the company CEO. In December 2018, Musk emailed Altman and other executives that OpenAI would not be relevant “without a dramatic change in execution and resources….This needs billions per year immediately or forget it,” Musk emailed. “I really hope I’m wrong.” OpenAI’s blog pulled no punches: ?“We’re sad that it’s come to this with someone whom we’ve deeply admired—someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, started a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI’s mission without him”.

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In a typical Muskian twist, he then posted that he will withdraw the legal suit, if OpenAI changed its name to ClosedAI??

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Let me drag myself away from the shenanigans at OpenAI and Elon Musk to closer home. The Indian government finally made a move on its vaunted India AI Mission with ?Union Cabinet approving an outlay of Rs. 10,371.92 crore for a period of five years, to give a further push for Artificial Intelligence in India. This mission is set to have eight components including IndiaAI Compute Capacity, IndiaAI Innovation Centre, a dataset platform among others. "Further, an AI marketplace will be designed to offer AI as a service and pre-trained models to AI innovators. It will act as a one-stop solution for resources critical for AI innovation," the government said. Moreover, the innovation centres will undertake the development and deployment of indigenous Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and domain-specific foundational models in critical sectors. My take: it is a good start, if the Government actually walks the talk. Previous history shows that it is not providing for the money that is the problem, but simplifying how this actually goes forward on the ground. Additionally, while the amount seems large, it is akin to what typically one large province in China sets aside for AI. 25000 GPUs will not build a world-class LLM. But hopefully with the right public-private-academia partnership, it will jumpstart AI.

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Also, I have always maintained that India should look for a ‘third way’ to do AI for the masses, not just blindly copy US and China. I all this JanAI ?(people’s AI), where GenAI is integrated as a part of the India stack and served as a Digital Public Good, much like UPI and Aadhar were.

Read my article on JanAI

The space is certainly heating up….at warp speed.