This might be the most plausible theory I’ve heard on Sam Altman’s departure from OpenAI.
Sam was notorious for building a moat around whatever project he was working on. As a fast moving operator if you’re running the world‘s biggest AI company, your biggest challenge is GPUs
twitter.com/ramahluwalia/status/1725913259788657042?s=46&t=q_8N6kPVRbBTZwDeV5oE5w
Why give all your money to GPU chipmakers?
Next logical step = get into the GPU supply chain and this way you can deploy the picks and shovels strategy yourself in addition to rapid advancements in the application and research layers of AI.
What is “picks and shovels” strategy?
Rmr the gold rush? Why compete with all the other gold diggers when you can just own the hardware store and sell them all picks and shovels?
In business, competing directly against a competitor or many of them can be difficult. Better if you get into the underlying supply chain.
OpenAI has competing products & companies. With Google, Meta, Anthropic, X/Grok you’ve got serious competition to ChatGPT.
With various image gen tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion etc. you’ve got serious competition for DALL3.
Who has very little competition? NVIDIA & AMD
So it would make perfect sense if in the race to productize artificial intelligence @sama ran for the forests whereas the OpenAI board is busy focusing on trees.
This is ofc speculative so we don’t truly know what happened until more comes to light and we hear from Sam and @gdb
Either way, it’s always sad to see a great CEO get ousted from their company.
I’m looking forward to seeing what he builds next and who else leaves OpenAI.
Also curious how this changes the AI race with Google, Microsoft, Meta, Anthropic, X and other companies at the forefront.