OpenAI’s slow-motion train wreck
Mira Murati’s departure is the just the last episode in a long-running drama
This is one of the most famous magazine covers of our time.
So is this one.
This one, from last September, may soon become just as iconic.
From left to right that’s Ilya Sutskever (now gone, less than a year later), Greg Brockman (on leave, at least until the end of the year), CTO Mira Murati (departure just announced) and Sam Altman (fired, and then rehired).
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Co-founders John Schulman also left, so did Andrej Karpathy and Jan Leike, and perhaps a dozen others.
GPT-5 hasn’t dropped, Sora hasn’t shipped, the company had an operating loss of $5b last year, there is no obvious moat, Meta is giving away similar software for free, many lawsuits pending.
Yet people are valuing this company at $150 billion dollars.
Absolutely insane. Investors shouldn’t be pouring more money at higher valuations, they should be asking what is going on.
Gary Marcus is the author of Taming Silicon Valley, and has repeatedly warned that OpenAI might someday be seen as the WeWork of AI.
Eventually the con will be revealed and the bubble will burst.
This is hubris.
We live in a world where this attitude has become the norm.
More often than not, this attitude stems from a position of privilege.
A startup that has absorbed most of the attention and, let's face it - resources has a live saga on social media.
Every few weeks, something happens at OpenAI.
And that's not a problem, but the "actors" are tweeting their plans and decisions. They leave, come back, leave, and start a new startup...
All this is delivered as it is happening, and we should somehow care about it.
If you'd like to leave, tell the people who should know.
This is not a PSA.
You don't need an audience for this to validate your decision.
Is it just me wondering about this?
I'm sorry, I can't hold this off.