Reporting notes from the AI trenches, 3/4-3/8
A wild week with OpenAI, Elon Musk, and Hadestown
Happy Sunday evening!
How was your weekend? For me, one word: Hadestown.
I was thrilled to see the Broadway show with my hubby and niece on a rainy, stormy Manhattan night.
The comedy, the tragedy, the beauty of the show’s Greek myth metaphor…hey, Hadestown could have been the state of AI news right now. Elon Musk and Sam Altman taking turns as Hades, perhaps? Ha ha ha.
As for last week reporting from the AI trenches…
As Chandler Bing might say, could OpenAI suck more air out of the AI news cycle last week? Honestly, it’s remarkable how the company managed to cling to the buzz all week long — though some of it was likely unintentional.
Monday, 3/4: A week ago, the tech world was still agog over the details of Elon Musk’s new lawsuit filed against OpenAI, its CEO Sam Altman, and its president Greg Brockman. In my weekly AI Beat column I dug into the fact that Musk’s lawsuit cites the word “nonprofit” 17 times, “Board” comes up a whopping 62 times, and “AGI” is mentioned 66 times.
That begged the question: How did nerdy nonprofit governance issues tied to the rise of artificial general intelligence spark a legal firestorm? Well, it all winds back to the beginning of OpenAI, which Musk’s lawsuit lays out in more detail than we have previously seen: In 2015, Musk, Altman and Brockman joined forces to form a nonprofit AI lab that would try to catch up to Google in the race for AGI — developing it “for the benefit of humanity, not for a for-profit company seeking to maximize shareholder profits.”
Tuesday, 3/5: I hadn’t planned on an opinion piece for Tuesday, but something about the open letter released by venture capitalist Ron Conway and his firm SV Angel “Build AI for a Better Future,” rubbed me the wrong way.
Over 300 signatories, including companies like OpenAI, Salesforce, Google, Meta and Microsoft, had signed the letter, which called for “everyone to build, broadly deploy, and use AI to improve people’s lives and unlock a better future,” by the time I wrote it. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman touted the “spirit of this letter,” while other companies were “proud” to sign it.
But ugh: With vague pronouncements like “The purpose of AI is for humans to thrive much more than we could before,” and “AI is for all of us, and all of us have a role to play in building AI to improve people’s lives,” it’s difficult to understand what the point of the letter really is; who it is meant to target; and why it is being published now.
Wednesday, 3/6: By Tuesday night, jaws opened for popcorn all around Silicon Valley after OpenAI dropped a new blog post that responded to the Elon Musk lawsuit, bringing some serious receipts.
On Wednesday morning, I rushed to point out the most revealing tidbits in the emails. A bit of a throwaway story, but such juicy morsels! Tesla as OpenAI’s “cash cow?” Ilya Sutskever saying the ‘open’ in OpenAI“means that everyone should benefit from the fruits of AI after its built, but it’s totally OK to not share the science”? It was irresistable.
Thursday, 3/7: Nothing could have prepared me for the reaction this piece got — a little scoop about how staffers and scientists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) were up in arms about the expected appointment of former OpenAI researcher and ‘effective altruist’ Paul Christiano to a role at the agency’s new US Safety Institute.
This is a small, traditionally non-ideological agency within the US Department of Commerce, so I have to admit I did not anticipate much reaction to this very inside-baseball piece. But the AI tribal wars on X/formerly Twitter were in full swing — the EAs, the e/acc, the AI ethics folks, the doomers, the optimists, and everyone in between. Everyone, and I mean EVERYONE seemed to have an opinion. I finally had to stop reading the comments and quote shares — and get some sleep.
Friday, 3/8: I published my final weekly story about hot startup Insilico Medicine and the news that their first AI-generated and AI-discovered drug was in Phase II clinical trials. Fascinating stuff.
But doesn’t there always seem to be a late-Friday news drop? Sure enough, it was from OpenAI, with the news that Sam Altman had been reinstated to the company’s nonprofit board (why it needs him, I’m not sure) and that three new female members were added.
The company clearly wants the drama that surrounded Altman’s ouster and continues to mount around Musk’s lawsuit to be tamped down. But I’m not sure if that’s possible at this point. The OpenAI drama continues, it seems. Maybe one day the show will make it Broadway.