AI doomsayers blamed in OpenAI's undoing

OpenAI has gone from ruling the world of artificial intelligence with ChatGPT to chaos, its chief executive ousted seemingly for advancing too fast and too far with the risky technology.

The exit of Sam Altman set in motion a series of events that saw the upstart company's biggest investor, Microsoft, swoop in to hire the toppled CEO and begin a process of building an OpenAI clone in the Redmond, Washington-based tech giant.

In some ways the looming result to the weekend saga is hardly a surprise, with many wondering how the board members could be naive enough to think they could outmanoeuvre Altman.

Silicon Valley was left aghast by Altman's firing, with the investor community and OpenAI's own staff furious that the four-person board got in the way of going faster into the AI age.

"We are not happy about it. We want stability here," said Ryan Steelberg, CEO of Veritone, a company that helps firms develop artificial intelligence.

Instead of OpenAI becoming the new Apple or Google, the harsh critics see a deeply troubled start-up that fell victim to the pearl-clutching of an incompetent board.

"We reached this point because minuscule risks have been hysterically amplified by the exotic thinking of sci-fi mindsets, and clickbait journalism from the press," veteran venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, an early investor in OpenAI, wrote in The Information.

Other observers warned that the drama in San Francisco proved that AI was too vital to be left in the hands of its creators.

"This is an important reminder that as brilliant as the designers of tech like AI — scientists or engineers — are, they are still just fallible people," said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights.

"That is why it is important not to just defer to them on a technology that everyone agrees has significant risks even as it promises tremendous benefits," he added.

Gary Marcus, a respected AI expert, said OpenAI's civil war "highlights the fact that we can't really trust the companies to self-regulate AI where even their own internal governance can be deeply conflicted."

Government regulation, notably by the tougher-minded European Union, was needed more than ever, he added.

"This is like the best possible scenario for them, and the OpenAI board I am sure is kicking itself. They were clearly detached from reality," said Carolina Milanesi, analyst at Creative Strategies.