Mods Are Asleep. Quick, Everyone Release AI Products
THE TURMOIL AT OpenAI over the past five days has captivated the tech industry and kept entrepreneurs, journalists, and anyone who still has an X account glued to their timelines for the latest emoji updates and lower-case missives. In the meantime, some of the most prominent AI companies—including OpenAI—continued to do what Silicon Valley is known for: dropping new products.
The unexpected firing of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, was followed by an avalanche of new AI features from competitors, including Anthropic and Stable Diffusion. On Tuesday afternoon, in the midst of turmoil, OpenAI rolled out ChatGPT with voice capabilities for free to all users. OpenAI had prereleased this in late September, but only for paid users. Now the update is more widespread.
Even though OpenAI dominated the conversation in Silicon Valley throughout 2023 with its zeitgeist-capturing products, like Dall-E 3 and ChatGPT powered by GPT-4, the chaos inflicted by the board’s decision to undermine Altman and speedrun through new CEOs may have created a window of opportunity for other AI companies. (Despite the fact that Altman eventually returned to continue leading OpenAI.) And while these product updates were months in the making, the timing couldn’t have been better for OpenAI competitors. Many enterprise customers of OpenAI’s tools, spooked by Altman’s exit, considered making a switch over to Anthropic or another provider while he was out.
