The tribulations of OpenAI & Sam Altman: values vs value
This past week saw an upheaval in the tech world. AI’s poster child, OpenAI, was rocked by drama. But the plot felt like a hallucination-ridden response to a vague ChatGPT prompt.
What happened, and why?
We don’t (yet) know all the details, but on Friday, the 17th of November, a few days after their first DevDay, OpenAI’s board convened and fired openAI’s CEO, Sam Altman.
And a mere 5 days later, after the employees almost all threatened to quit and the interim CEOs all quit one after the other, the board was replaced by one that favoured Sam Altman’s return, and he has come back.
The cause of this upheaval? A clash between values and value. Or, to phrase things differently, a conflict between a non-profit goal and a for-profit business.
And part of the… fun? as developers, is working out the “subtext”, the values and aspirations that hide behind the tasks we are given. I’m a great fan of Simon Sinek’s “Start With Why” concept. Our goal as developers is to provide an answer that fits the “Why”behind the task or behind our users needs.
It’s also part of the struggle of creating on the interwebs, since the goal is to provide useful content. So if you feel like there is a need I could be meeting better, feel free to le me know by filling in this form 😇
This weeks’ focus…
Has been on :
- implementing AuthJS with the app/ router on Next JS
- developing an NPM module to download and parse data from Notion and use it as content for the blog