One of the two founders of the original meme cryptocurrency Dogecoin, the most active and influential of the two on the X app, Billy Markus, has published a comment on what the mainstream media has referred to as “OpenAI coup.” OpenAI is widely known as the creator of the ChatGPT AI bot.
OpenAI CEO replaced, his statement to follow
The chief executive officer and co-founder of the company Sam Altman has been relieved of his position and OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati has been appointed by the board of directors to take over from him. However, Altman is to remain part of the company.
Following this unexpected turn of events, the company’s president Greg Brockman chose to step down to support Altman. According to an official statement from OpenAI, the board has lost confidence in Sam Altman’s ability to successfully lead the company into the future.
American venture capitalist and philanthropist Ron Conway compared this situation to 1985, when the Apple board fired Steve Jobs, who created Apple together with Steve Wozniak.
What happened at OpenAI today is a Board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs. It is shocking; it is irresponsible; and it does not do right by Sam & Greg or all the builders in OpenAI.
According to Brian Chesky, co-founder of the Airbnb service, who has offered total support to Altman and Brockman, the former OpenAI CEO will make a public statement later today.
Here’s where DOGE founder steps in
Elon Musk, owner of the X app, CEO of Tesla, SpaceX and several other innovative companies, contributed several million USD to OpenAI in 2015 and was on its board for a while. Back then, OpenAI was a non-profit AI research organization, but later, when the company decided to start making profits, Musk opted to quit. Later on, the Microsoft giant invested in OpenAI heavily.
At the start of this year, Elon Musk began criticizing ChatGPT for being “woke,” i.e., avoiding answering users’ questions on certain dangerous topics — religion, sex, politics, gender change and others — or giving them softened replies so as not to cause any offense.
By now, Musk has released his own AI bot called Grok and launched it on the X platform. Users of Premium + on X will have access to Grok. This AI bot is reported to have a sense of humor — something that ChatGPT does not even go close to.
Many supporters of Elon Musk and users of the X app have been criticizing ChatGPT. Billy Markus, the co-founder of DOGE, is among them. He sarcastically tweeted that now he expects a movie to be made based on the OpenAI story.
Apparently, he referred to the collapse of the FTX exchange that happened a year ago and Amazon Studios’ plans to shoot a film based on this story. Similarly, the book by Ben Mezrich called “The Accidental Billionaires” was adapted into the “The Social Network” movie. It includes an episode of Mark Zuckerberg taking the idea of the Winklevoss twins Tyler and Cameron and adopting it for his Facebook platform. In 2004, the twins sued Zuckerberg for that.
In 2008, they received $65 million in settlement.