Rival firm Anthropic AI was tapped to take over OpenAI by its board of directors after it fired Sam Altman on Friday. But Anthropic AI CEO and co-founder Dario Amodei, who was once an employee of OpenAI, refused to merge the two companies and turned down the position of CEO at OpenAI.
Amodei was quick to turn down the offer, reported The Information. Since Amodei was asked to consider the chief executive position after Altman was let go, it is clear that he was the board’s first choice before hiring current interim CEO Emmett Shear, co-founder of the streaming platform Twitch.
It’s been a crazy couple of days right from Silicon Valley to Redmond, with high-drama events unfolding one after another at OpenAI and Microsoft.
OpenAI changed CEOs twice over the weekend, first appointing Mira Murati as the interim executive.
From the looks of it, it seems that the move wasn’t well planned or orchestrated with solid reasoning behind it.
In hindsight, a merger between Anthropic and OpenAI would have complicated things further because Amazon and Google back the former, whereas OpenAI has a major chunk of Microsoft’s investment.
Non-stop power struggle
The moves by the board members of OpenAI over the last 48 hours have been staggering. Although their loyalty to the mission of the company hasn’t been questioned, the board hasn’t been able to justify Sam’s firing and strategically handle the repercussions that followed.
Over 700 employees are in revolt and have threatened the board to either resign or watch the entire company quit, whereas Altman has been given a new AI division to run at Microsoft.
Whether the board, which stands divided after Ilya Sutskever’s apology, resigns or not remains to be seen.
Anthropic AI was launched in January 2021, primarily founded by the Amodei siblings – Dario and Daniela. Other senior members of the OpenAI Research team who worked on models like GPT-2 and GPT-3 followed Amodei. The company is known for its Claude chatbot series, which is similar to and a competitor of ChatGPT.
Why did several high-ranking positions at OpenAI decide to leave and form their own company? Well, they didn’t see eye to eye with their former employer on how to make sure that artificial intelligence (AI) is developed and governed in a safe and secure manner.
The tech giants invested in Anthropic
Anthropic has caught the attention of two giant players, Google and Amazon. First, Google wanted to be Anthropic’s buddy, so they tossed $300 million into the friendship hat for a 10% share in 2022. In return, Anthropic promised to use Google’s fancy computing resources. Just like OpenAI uses Microsoft’s computing power.
In 2023, Amazon offered Anthropic an even bigger investment – a whopping $4 billion, of which $1.25 billion was immediately handed, making Amazon a mini-owner of Anthropic. Anthropic made a deal with Amazon to use its cloud service AWS and, in turn, to make its AI models available to AWS customers.
Google didn’t want to miss out on the playdate. A month after Amazon’s bid, Google threw in another $500 million and promised an extra $1.5 billion over time.
ABOUT THE EDITOR
Sejal Sharma Sejal is a Delhi-based journalist, currently dedicated to reporting on technology and culture. She is particularly enthusiastic about covering artificial intelligence, the semiconductor industry and helping people understand the powers and pitfalls of technology. Outside of work, she likes to play badminton and spend time with her dogs. Feel free to email her for pitches or feedback on her work.
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