Foundational Risks of OpenAI – On my Om:

There are quite a few takes on the play-by-play events, but for me, the big question is what this really means in the long term for the forward momentum of artificial intelligence and its impact on the broader technology ecosystem. While it might sound pessimistic, the past 24 hours have exposed a massive and obvious foundational risk in placing all bets on a single entity.

It’s likely that Satya Nadella and his team at Microsoft didn’t expect Sam Altman’s firing and the subsequent upheaval at OpenAI in their AI future plans. One has to wonder if this was even considered as a foundational risk. I understand that investing billions in OpenAI, partly for Azure’s Cloud use and access to top AI research, was attractive, but one has to wonder if the ambition to outperform Google and Amazon Web Services overshadowed these risks?

So much of the commentary and punditry around this stuff is about the twelve-dimensional chess that everyone assumes is being played behind the scenes, and rightly so. If these tech commentators acknowledge the possibility that none of these multibillion-dollar corporations and the overpaid CEOs that run them actually have no real strategy or plans and are all just chasing whatever shiny object will keep the investors happy, the whole game would come crashing down around them.