What does OpenAI’s rapid unscheduled disassembly mean for the future of AI?

Forgive media companies if they felt a little schadenfreude this weekend. For the past two decades, they’ve been criticized (often rightly, sometimes wrongly) for making terrible management decisions in the face of digital disruption. They’ve seen a few tech giants devour what used to be their revenue streams and be praised as geniuses for building a new generation of corporations.

But I struggle to remember a three-day span in which any media company has set itself on fire as profoundly as OpenAI just did. In less than 72 hours, it accomplished the impossible: making Tronc seem well run by comparison.

And it was a complete own goal. There was no extant crisis demanding a risky reaction. One day, it’s a company worth $80 billion (maybe $90 billion) and the most exciting new tech company in a decade. And now — well, if OpenAI announced in a few days that 95% of its employees had resigned and it was winding up business, would anyone be shocked?

To be fair, no one knows what even the nearest-term future of OpenAI will bring. But that’s damning itself: Important companies aren’t supposed to be ephemeral creatures whose next few days’ existence are up for debate. When you’ve got crypto companies taunting your terrible management — “the board just torched $80B of value, destroyed a shining star of American capitalism” — you know things are bad.

For anyone who missed all the roller coaster’s twists, read a tick-tock (not a TikTok) from The New York Times. Or just scan these headlines from The Verge:

What impact will all this have on publishers, who produce some of the information these AI models are trained on and who are increasingly looking to OpenAI and their ilk for revenue? It’s too early to say with any certainty — but in general, a competitive AI marketplace with multiple players should generate better returns for publishers than one dominated by a single company. So an implosion at the most successful AI company would seem, at some level, beneficial. But that’s complicated by the reality that OpenAI’s strengths haven’t vanished — they’ve simply been delivered to Microsoft, a little mom-and-pop firm worth a mere $2.78 trillion. OpenAI’s decline would also hinder the strongest AI competitor that isn’t a pre-existing tech giant (Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft) — making it more likely that the next generation of winners will look a lot like the last one.

Then there’s the question of projects like OpenAI’s $5 million partnership with the American Journalism Project “to explore ways in which the development of artificial intelligence (AI) can support a thriving, innovative local news field.” Will there even be an OpenAI left to write the checks? What about the partnership with the Associated Press that gives AP access to OpenAI’s technology in exchange for access to AP’s archives? Or the $395,000 it gave NYU to support “workshops and discussions on existing and emerging journalism ethics issues”? OpenAI was already several pages through the Google/Facebook playbook, throwing money around the news industry to try to counteract media complaints — will any of that continue? Or will Microsoft follow suit?

In their letter threatening to quit, the 500-plus OpenAI employees write something remarkable. They report that the OpenAI board had “informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.'” In other words: The mission of OpenAI is to produce beneficial technology. If OpenAI is going to produce harmful technology, the correct response is to self-abort. A rapid unscheduled disassembly, you might say.

Whether or not that was board members’ intent Friday morning, they seem to have accomplished it.

Photo of then-OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at TechCrunch Disrupt, October 03, 2019, by TechCrunch used under a Creative Commons license.