OpenAI, which started as a non-profit company in 2019, has changed its decision-making on profit-making activities in earnest. As a small number of executives, including Sam Altman, have complained about existing start-up members on the left and right, ChatGPT leaders have failed to dismiss Altman, leaving the company and attracting huge investment from Purple Lexy and Entropic start-up big tech companies
“They are leading a new wave of start-ups in Silicon Valley. Building on OpenAI’s technological legacy, we move to build a safer and more ethical AI ecosystem.”
In November last year, Business Insider analyzed Silicon Valley entrepreneurs called the “Open AI Mafia.” The OpenAI Mafia refers to a group of startups founded by OpenAI employees independently from OpenAI.
Open AI mafias, who are currently leading the AI ecosystem and leading innovation, are considered “proven talents” as they once played an important role in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) in open AI.
Examples include Ilya Sutzkeber, founder of Safe Super Intelligence (SSI), Dario Amodei, co-founder of Ansropic, Mira Murati, founder of the “Mother of ChatGPT,” who oversaw ChatGPT development, and Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Purple Lexity.
This is why numerous investors immediately flocked to the news that they started their own businesses. Anthropicen Amazon and Google, which developed the generative AI model Claude, and Purple Lexitien Nvidia, which developed the same generative AI as the company’s name, made investments.
SSI, which has not officially attracted venture capital or external funds at all, saw its corporate value exceed $30 billion (about 43 trillion won) in eight months after its establishment. Founded in March 2023 by Brett Taylor, chairman of the OpenAI Board of Directors, “Sierra,” an AI start-up, is recognized for its corporate value of $4.5 billion in one and a half years after its establishment in October last year. The robot AI company Coventry, which was merged with Amazon, was founded by Peter Chen, a former OpenAI researcher, and Musk’s xAI was also co-founder Igor Babushkin, a career in OpenAI researcher. So far, there are about 30 AI startups created by current and former open AI talents. Elon Musk, who is currently in legal battle with Sam Altman as OpenAI’s strongest opponent, is also one of the OpenAI co-founders.
To look at the origin of the OpenAI Mafia, we need to return to the point of the “OpenAI coup” in 2023.
The OpenAI Mafia aims to develop safe and ethical AI. Founded in 2015, OpenAI’s transition from non-profit to commercialization by attracting $10 billion in investment from Microsoft and others in 2019 was a huge shock to OpenAI Mafia. This is because it was a completely different direction from the company and their beliefs.
The OpenAI Mafia was also unhappy with OpenAI’s increasingly closed decision-making. This is because the company’s decision was centered on the board of directors and a small number of management. They were particularly critical of the decision-making structure focused on a specific minority, such as OpenAI CEO Altman and OpenAI Chairman Greg Brockman.
Altman and anti-Altman forces have been at odds over the decision-making structure. In OpenAI, a non-profit organization was the top authority in the articles of association, and a for-profit subsidiary was in charge of actual product development and profit generation. The board was part of the non-profit side and aimed for the safe development of general-purpose artificial intelligence (AGI). The problem is that while OpenAI attracts huge investment from Microsoft and others, there was a structural contradiction that the board of directors should adhere to the non-profit philosophy.
It was only a matter of time before the conflict came to the surface. The explosion of this conflict, which has reached a critical point, is the “Open AI coup” that led to Altman’s dismissal on November 17, 2023.
At the time, the OpenAI board determined that Altman did not provide sufficient information about the company’s key decisions and delivered misleading information on some issues. The board of directors dismissed Altman, led by Ilya Suzukeber, co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.
The coup appeared to be a success, but the majority of OpenAI employees protested by submitting a collective resignation demanding Altman’s return, and the board eventually reversed its decision to dismiss him in less than a week. “This incident has made us reflect on the structure of our organization,” Altman said in a return statement. “In the future, we will create a much more transparent and clear accountability structure.”
The coup ended in failure, with the return of Altman as CEO and the replacement of most of the board members. After the dismissal, OpenAI completely reorganized the composition of its board of directors and shifted to an investor- and industry-friendly structure. It has transformed into an organization that values commerciality more than safety.
As the coup failed, the options of those who stood on the anti-Altman front became clear. Their decision was also influenced by the company’s emphasis on commerciality over safety. There was only one road left. Like the saying, “If you don’t like temples, the middleman should leave,” they had to say goodbye to OpenAI and go their own way. In this way, a large number of talented people who were once involved in the development of GPT series and training of Large Language Models (LLM) in OpenAI left OpenAI and started their own businesses.
The OpenAI Mafia believes that the closed-door structure and for-profit purposes harm the publicity and safety of AI. They also aim for the philosophy of sharing information based on open sources. Purple Lexity, co-founded by Srinivas, and founder Murati’s TML are disclosing technologies based on this philosophy. Amodei Anthropic founder once said, “OpenAI is no longer open.”
The OpenAI Mafia is also compared to the PayPal Mafia, the original version of the “○○ Mafia.”
PayPal Mafia is a group of startups founded by former PayPal employees who left the company after PayPal was acquired by eBay in 2002. Examples include Tesla CEO Musk, Palantir Technology Chairman Peter Till, and LinkedIn founder Reed Hoffman.
The term OpenAI Mafia was coined based on the fact that open AI employees establish new startups after quitting are similar to PayPal Mafia. It is a comparison to the mafia that helps each other’s businesses and expands their influence based on solid connections and trust between founders.
The OpenAI Mafia, which appeared more than 20 years after the PayPal Mafia, is a start-up group led by people from a single company, but it differs in its background, philosophy, relationship with its parents (Paypal and OpenAI), and business orientation. Unlike PayPal Mafia, which resigned after the company (Paypal) was acquired, OpenAI Mafia consists of people who quit due to internal conflicts over OpenAI’s philosophy and operation method. They share the internal skills and philosophy of OpenAI, but they are critical of its direction or try to suggest alternatives.
In addition to opposing commercialization, the OpenAI Mafia and OpenAI largely disagree on the speed, direction, and control structure of AI development.
If OpenAI aims to quickly develop AGI, an artificial intelligence above the human level, the OpenAI Mafia is in the position that the safety of AI should be considered first. When OpenAI quickly commercialized and released various models such as GPT-4 and GPT-4o to preoccupy the AI market, OpenAI Mafia expressed concern about this. It is dangerous to spread AI quickly without sufficient review of the potential risks of technology.
The start-up founded by Suitskeber, a former chief scientist in OpenAI, symbolically shows the philosophy of the OpenAI Mafia. “We have only one goal and one product,” Suitskeber said in SSI’s founding statement. This is a ‘safe superintelligence’ and focused on ‘safety’.
Amodei, a former vice president of OpenAI research, told The Times in March, “We believe AI can become smarter than humans. That could be next year,” he said.
The emergence of the open AI mafia is a major event that shows the philosophical disagreement and multipolarization of power in the AI industry.
As open AI mafias left open AI and started their own businesses, AI companies such as Anthropic, Purple Lexity, and SSI were born. As a result, the AI ecosystem led by a small number of companies centered on OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind has become more diverse. It also served as an opportunity to awaken awareness that ethics and safety are as important as speed in AI development. This is illustrated by the fact that Altman, who was ousted in a coup, returned to the CEO and vowed to create a much more transparent and clearer accountability structure.