If Altman becomes toxic, what will Microsoft do? Will the company double down on support for him, or drop him as fast as it can? To understand that, we’ll look at his recent controversies, then at Microsoft’s likely response.
The mighty fall fast
Until recently, Altman was the friendly face of AI, the go-to-expert for Congressmen who wanted to understand how it worked and what they should do about it, an I-feel-your-pain-and-worry-about-AI kind of guy who admitted that yes, perhaps AI might destroy humankind as we know it, but there’s plenty we can do about it, so let’s start now.
A blip of controversy last November, in which OpenAI’s board of directors fired Altman because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board,” quickly blew over. Microsoft staunchly defended its golden boy, offering to hire him to head its advanced AI research team, and Altman was reinstated as CEO of OpenAI after an outcry from investors and employees.
But lately things have begun unraveling for him. It began with Johansson claiming that OpenAI illegally copied her voice to be the voice for Sky, the company’s personal AI assistant, after she refused to license it to Altman. He used her voice, she says, because she voiced the AI assistant main character in the movie Her.
She says she turned him down once, and he tried again. That second time, she says, before he even heard back from her, he used a copy of her voice in a public demo of the technology. To back up her claim, she notes that right before the demo was released, Altman tweeted a single word: “Her.”
“When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered, and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference,” she said.
