Social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter) has become an active space to discuss, debate, and share opinions. That’s exactly what Zak Kukoff did. Kukoff, who claims himself to be an investor, shared a screenshot recently.
A screenshot sparked further discussions. It shows Mircosoft CEO Satya Nadella saying that it wouldn’t matter if OpenAI disappeared tomorrow, as they have all the IP rights and capabilities. Nadella said, “We have the people, we have the compute, we have the data, we have everything.”
Nadella did say these words in an interview with the New York Magazie. The interview was about the swift and brief departure of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Microsoft had recruited Altman after this episode; eventually, Altman ended up going back to OpenAI. Microsoft took a non-voting observer position on the OpenAI board.
Nadella said in the interview, “We are in there. We are below them, above them, and around them. We do the kernel optimizations, we build tools, and we build the infrastructure. So that’s why I think a lot of the industrial analysts are saying, ‘Oh wow, it’s really a joint project between Microsoft and OpenAI.’ The reality is that we are, as I said, very self-sufficient in all of this.”
Kukoff posted the image with a witty caption reading, “I have to give it to Satya. This is such a baller quote.”
The allegation shared by Kukoff intends to say that GPT-4 is a closed platform as it aims to serve the commercial interests of Microsoft only. According to Microsoft, “GPT-4 is a large multimodal model (accepting text or image inputs and generating text) that can solve difficult problems with greater accuracy than any of OpenAI's previous models.”
The post shared further says that a case has been filed to enforce OpenAI's commitment to its original mission of developing artificial intelligence (AGI) that will help humanity. Recently, Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, over a contract breach. Musk alleged that the company had abandoned its mission to use AI to benefit society.
As per CNBC, the law suit says, “To this day, OpenAI, Inc.‘s website continues to profess that its charter is to ensure that AGI benefits all of humanity.’ In reality, however, OpenAI, Inc. has been transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft.”
The post, as mentioned before, saw several mixed responses, with one user, Joshua Segeren, saying, “I've no doubt Satya absolutely hates having a dependency on OpenAI at all, and he hates the notion that investors, shareholders, and customers might be worried about another OpenAI governance issue or phenomenon like what happened in November. It was a surprise for MSFT and embarrassed them.”
He further added, “I'm sure they're doing everything possible to replicate GPT-4(++) internally. But I also think that if they'd truly caught up with or surpassed OpenAI, they wouldn't be shy about letting the world know.”
