Tori Sanderson

Product and design thinking, human-centred design, content strategy. Managing Director at

[Women's Agenda @WomensAgenda]

Tori Sanderson looks at the new Jobs & Skills Australia Generative AI study and what it means for women in STEM.
https://t.co/6264AGKZms

[🚩Dan Credentials🚩 @CharlemagnumPI]

Becoming a dinosaur scientist and winning a gold medal for jumping on the trampoline, don't tell any 7 year old their dreams are out of reach

[Toby Ord @tobyordoxford]

The last few days exploded the myth that Sam Altman's incredible power faces any accountability.
He tells us we shouldn't trust him, but we now know the board *can't* fire him.
I think that's important.

[Emily Chang @emilychangtv]

One of the biggest tasks ahead for OpenAI is building a new board - one that includes women:

The names of several women were floated including @laurenepowell and @marissamayer but deemed too close to @sama. @CondoleezzaRice also considered but dismissed.

We’re told the new board *will* include women but that’s just step one — roundup by @tsgiles @shiringhaffary @ashleevance

https://t.co/guHLsxtSYR

[Erik Torenberg @eriktorenberg]

Why is the OpenAI board not saying anything?

Nearly all of Silicon Valley is defending the other side, and barely anyone one is speaking up for the individual board members because it's hard to defend someone who won't defend themselves.

When no one hears from you, everyone assumes the worst.

Lawyers and PR teams who tell people to stay silent don't appreciate how important shaping public perception is—it's hard to convince employees to stay when the entire industry has made up their mind.

Maybe the board will come out with a bomb shell soon (and a reason why they had to keep silent), but if they continue to stay silent the public will just assume they don't have a strong case.

[Ashlee Vance @ashleevance]

Next Google Meet update to include new "Are you sure you want to terminate your CEO?" feature that has an AI chatbot walk you through the possible consequences of your actions when it hears talk of a coup.

[Courtney Ellis 🎈 @courtneyellis]

Please do not ask a bookworm if they are going to finish the books they have before buying more. It is very offensive in our culture.

[Ben South @bnj]

Interim CEO at OpenAI is the new Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

If you told me 10 years ago that a group of the smartest engineers in the land would evoke the threat, "Do what I say or I will go to work at Microsoft," I would not have believed you. Amazing shift in corporate reputation (and much credit to Satya).

[Matthew Prince 🌥 @eastdakota]

I’m told mine is a contrarian view on the events of the last few days, so here goes…

Contrary to what @kevinroose and others have written, Microsoft was not a winner of the events of the last few days around #OpenAI. They were in a much better place on Friday morning last week than they are today. Friday morning they had invested ~$11B in OpenAI and captured most of its upside while still having enough insulated distance to allow @BradSmi to claim things to regulators like “ChatGPT is more open than Meta’s Llama” and to allow any embarrassing LLM hallucinations or other ugliness to be OpenAI’s problem, not Microsoft’s.

Sunday morning they were at their lowest point. There was real risk they lose all their ~$11B investment and look like absolute fools for making that size of investment without any real governance controls. Very smart people who have followed the news carefully, including some big fund managers who hold $MSFT, are still pinging me asking: how was that even possible?

Today they are better off than Sunday morning, but far, far worse off than they were Friday morning. Sure they will likely hire a bunch of the OpenAI team. But that doesn’t get them much they didn’t have before, and it comes with a ton of new reputational risk (they now own responsibility for any hallucinations or other ugliness) and execution risk (see DeepMind within Google for how all the smartest people in AI can still get stymied by the bureaucracy of a giant company).

I think the chances of the senior OpenAI folks still being at Microsoft in 3 years is asymptotically approaching zero. Where the independence and clear mission of OpenAI was exactly what could have kept that group of incredible talent motivated and aligned over the long term, making Office365 spreadsheets a bit more clever isn’t something that rallies a team like their’s. Sure they’ll try and have some level of independence, but the machinery of a trillion dollar+ business software behemoth is hard to not get caught up in and ground out by.

This was a very bad weekend for Microsoft (and, for that matter, OpenAI). I don’t see any clear winners. (Maybe @elonmusk or @benioff — indirectly?) It could have been worse, but it has still been a disaster for everyone directly involved. We’re not at the end of this story. But don’t see a lot of ways in the short term it gets better for Microsoft. And really hard to see how it could get better even over the long term than it looked for them and OpenAI Friday morning last week.

[Mike Bird @Birdyword]

Imagine, you're a board member at a non-profit which wants to build safe AI, and you're worried about how serious your CEO is about AI risk...

So you sack him and accidentally end up creating a new AI division inside a profit-maximising 2.7 trillion dollar tech company.

[Jeremy Kahn @jeremyakahn]

@theotherBoronik @GaryMarcus @Fortune The question I'm trying to raise is bigger: what OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepMind have all tried to do is raise billions & tap vast GPU resources of tech giants without having the resulting tech de facto controlled by them. I'm arguing the OpenAI fracas show that might be impossible.

[Gary Marcus @GaryMarcus]

Brilliant analysis below by @jeremyakahn @Fortune.

If OpenAI winds up blowing up the world, it will merit endless rereading.

“OpenAI’s structure was designed to enable OpenAI to raise the tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars it would need to succeed in its mission of building artificial general intelligence (AGI), the kind of AI that is as smart or smarter than people at most cognitive tasks, while at the same time preventing capitalist forces, and in particular a single big tech giant, from controlling AGI”

“Altman … struck the deal—for just $1 billion initially—with Nadella in 2019. From that moment on, the structure was basically a time bomb. By turning to a single corporate entity, Microsoft, for the majority of the cash and computing
power OpenAI needed to achieve its mission, it was essentially handling control to Microsoft, even if that control wasn’t codified in any formal governance mechanism.”

If Altman return sand the board resigns as now seems likely, “it will prove that Altman’s structure failed—OpenAI was not able to both raise billions of dollars from a big tech corporation while somehow remaining free from that corporation’s control.”

“It would be the ultimate irony if the flaws of the very structure Altman designed wind up saving his job at CEO and allowing him to outmaneuver the board that he established to safeguard AGI”

[Emily Chang @emilychangtv]

State of play:

- Negotiations for @Sama’s return have hit snag over makeup of board
- @satyanadella leading the charge on discussions
- Board wants input on new board members before they walk away so they are going through potential new candidates one by one. @btaylor seems to have been cleared by all parties.
- situation is *super dynamic* & could change any minute
- Sam keeping his options open ie. returning or starting newco

With @EdLudlow @dinabass @rachelmetz

https://t.co/2xYcdD4O5M

[Sheel Mohnot @pitdesi]

Not a big deal but great timing by Meta to leak this today and not get any heat.