A few hours ago, with a post on X, Satya Nadella the CEO of Microsoftofficially announced that Sam Altman will be hired by the Redmond giant to lead a development team on theartificial intelligence.
After Altman’s sudden dismissal as CEO of OpenAI (which only happened recently and without too many explanations), the American computer scientist and entrepreneur has moved on to “competition” even if, obviously, it is not competition given the ongoing partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI.
This, according to what Nadella shared, will not damage relations between the two companies but it is clear that recent events have led to some confusion among investors. Here’s what we know.
Sam Altman and his arrival at Microsoft
Nadella’s post reads: “We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and are confident in our product roadmap, in our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners”.
Despite these reassurances, it is clear that Altman’s arrival in the ranks of Microsoft has caused a certain uproar, especially since he has already been entrusted with the leadership of a work team that will be responsible for developing internal AI projects of the company.
It is not yet clear what these projects are, but they could be the perfect opportunity for the technology giant behind Windows to “free itself” from OpenAI and give life to its own artificial intelligence (perhaps) inspired by ChatGPTbut definitely not so dependent on the chatbot anymore.
After all, let Microsoft stay investing heavily in the matter of artificial intelligence is more than evident and being able to count on one’s own product, developed internally and without having to account to third parties, could be a nice competitive advantage over the competition, especially if this “phantom product” is developed by one of the minds brightest of our time, Sam Altman already considered by Time as one of 100 most influential people in the world in 2023. And this without having yet turned 40.
The future of AI according to Altman
Altman’s dismissal from OpenAI came (almost) like a bolt from the blue and, according to gossips, it could be due to a difference of opinion with Ilya Sutskever, another of the company’s big shots.
The two had already had disagreements in the past, above all because, while Sutskever had clearly shown some concerns about using an AI increasingly sophisticated, Altman would instead aim higher and higher, trying to make the most of the visibility and media attention obtained with ChatGPT.
Doubts, investments, future prospects (perhaps) too impressive to continue to have control over AI, have led to this distancing, with Microsoft who, clearly, did not miss an opportunity to seize the opportunity and secure one of the prominent figures on the topic of artificial intelligence.
