Innovation, permission and Sam Altman's groceries: all up for grabs, apparently

If only there was some sort of machine I could use to calculate it all

Photo © 2024 Tim Scalzo | https://unsplash.com/fr/@tjscalzo

Give me a minute while I sort through my groceries. There is quite a lot, isn’t there! Actually no, I haven’t been shopping. I just took these from Sam Altman’s fridge.

Yes, the ChatGPT guy. The one who got ousted for a nanomonth from OpenAI’s board last November for withholding information, telling fibs – oops I meant “providing inaccurate information” – and generally being an all-round rotter, while tweaking his moustache and blurting “mwah-ha-ha-harrr!” at every opportunity. At least, this is according to former board member Helen Toner who spoke up earlier this month.

Not the mwah-ha-ha-harrr bit, I admit, and Altman doesn’t have a moustache either. But he might have a white cat on his lap from time to time, and it is not impossible that he might tell uninvited visitors in a theatrically smug fashion that he is, in fact, expecting them.

OpenAI was founded as a non-profit organisation. So is the Dabbs household, as it turns out. The difference is that the non-profit millionaires who run non-profit OpenAI seem to be constantly – but non-profitably, of course – wading through billions of non-profit cash. Nope, it makes no sense to me either but that’s innovation for you.

Another unique factor of OpenAI is the way its management structure was devised specifically to protect the board of directors from being being told what to do by the investors. Naturally when Altman was booted out of his role as chief executive, the organisation’s investors told the board to reinstate him immediately, so they did. Then they told the board to resign, which they did as well. Glad to see that management structure sticking to its guns.

You can’t say that it’s not innovative, though, to say one thing then do completely the opposite. I guess Helen Toner’s just too dim to understand how innovation works. And as it happens, so am I.