A shocking slate of events in the world of artificial intelligence played out this weekend, as OpenAI abruptly dismissed its CEO Sam Altman without much explanation or warning.
OpenAI built the wildly popular ChatGPT app, a massive leap forward this year for AI, large language models, and web3, and Altman was the very public face of both the company and in the movement.
But in a statement Friday evening, the board of OpenAI said it lost confidence in Altman, who was unceremoniously dismissed on a Google Meet call.
A number of accusations and recriminations have followed, and just this morning, nearly the entirety of OpenAI said it would leave to join Altman in a role he already secured at a subsidiary of Microsoft.
In the absence of information about the massive shift in the AI world, people have attempted to fill in the blanks as to why someone so revered in the AI world could be so swiftly terminated.
Thanks to the tech messaging board Blind, the dots have been connected.
And they involve President Joe Biden, Chinese hackers, shell companies, and an international spy agencies.
“I got the juice (third hand direct from the source). The underlying cause of his removal was due to his ties to a Chinese cyber army group known as D2 (Double Dragon). OpenAI had been using data from D2 to train its AI models, including GPT-4. This data was obtained through a hidden business contract with a D2 shell company called Whitefly, which was based in Singapore. This D2 group has the largest and biggest crawling/indexing/scanning capacity in the world 10x more than Alphabet Inc (Google), hence the deal so Open AI could get their hands on vast quantities of data for training after exhausting their other options.”
According to this theory, China got wind of this deal and alerted Biden, who authorized the NSA to investigate. When it confirmed the relationship, OpenAI’s board was alerted to the unauthorized use of illegal pilfered data, and fired Altman.
In their statement, the board claimed that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications,” which the anonymous poster took to mean keeping his secret China hacking deal quiet.
The conspiracy migrated from Blind to TikTok, with one video pushing the secret reason Altman got canned racking up over 150,000 views.
@designalily Fresh off the press, and it actually explains everything that happened… • • • 👉🏻Get my FREE portfolio course showing you my websites that led me to $1.5 million+ in job offers✨ Productdesignclub.com/free My background: I’m a product designer and creator working in San Francisco Bay Area aka Silicon Valley. #womanintech #workintech #ceofired #samaltman #openai ♬ Obsidian – Bgnzinho
Unfortunately, the account that posted it couldn’t provide much in the way of evidence. When asked for any shred of evidence, the account reponded: “trust me, bro.”
“Sorry will have to be a trust me bro due to sensitivity, but I’m sure we will see it coming out publicly over the next few weeks, you can buy me a coffee for my morning standup as an apology,” they said.
