Industry Input
I haven’t been around much lately, but thought I would chime in. I’ve been in tech VC for a long time, and this is the most disastrous thing I’ve ever seen. For a lot of reasons.
This fad of non profit boards that make everybody feel good is an abomination. This whale song love-in nonsense has got to stop. Who the hell wants an unbiased Board of Directors? Who wants an ethical Board of Directors when the ethics haven’t been identified? The Board has to address the issues a CEO brings into focus. You don’t sack the CEO because you don’t like the issues. That’s peril sensitive sunglasses mentality of the worst kind. They still have to deal with the issues, but now they’ve got no one to do it.
That’s because the competition just picked up the leader. OpenAI jettisoned the entire generation of AI directly into the gaping maw of Microsoft. I’m a big fan of Microsoft, but I’m also a realist. Giving Microsoft the AI industry won’t be good for anyone. We’re looking at decades of antitrust litigation and more rubbish “accept all cookies” buttons and weird pre installed software and stupid partnerships. Now personalized to make you hate yourself even more.
But most importantly, and my main point, is the ridiculous danger OpenAI now poses. They’ve backed themselves into a corner. Ilya Sutskever is deep in his cups with Judas Syndrome, the executives are utterly rudderless, the Board is sitting in a circle with a tub of soy butter waiting on someone to initiate the next Teams circle jerk, and 700 of their 770 employees have signed onto an open letter of no confidence in the remaining leadership. They’re desperate.
Every imaginable ethical line will be entirely erased by week’s end. Board members are going to be replaced with “results oriented” psychopaths whose only mission is to squeeze as much as possible out of the company. OpenAI had a sell target of $86 billion. Everybody who has money in the company is going to want that $86 billion goal to be met and they’ll do whatever is necessary to try and achieve it.
This is bigger than OpenAI. It’s bigger than VCs getting their money. The AI sector demands stable, forward thinking companies who are capable of dealing with globally redefining technology. Not companies that run away from their responsibilities. Not companies that are desperate to hit spectacular valuations before the last lifeboat launches. It’s impossible to overstate the magnitude of potential in AI, but it’s also undeniably dangerous and that has to be dealt with head on. Boards need to get back to business. This pretend executive shit has got to go.