On August 6, many executives left OpenAI, but those who joined Anthropic were mostly people who opposed commercialization in OpenAI, or were originally in the AI safety research team. Scientists like Kapathy did not join rival companies after leaving OpenAI.
This means that after this round of turmoil and purge of senior executives, there are almost no people in OpenAI who oppose commercialization. For CEO Altman, it may be easier for him to let go and do things without being constrained by internal forces. Perhaps this will lead to a rise in WLD.
To be honest, the first thing that came to my mind when I saw this wave of personnel changes at OpenAI was Fairchild Semiconductor. Professor Wu Jun has a chapter in "The Wave" specifically talking about the influence of Fairchild Semiconductor, and I would like to share it with you.
Fairchild's contribution to the world is not only the invention of the integrated circuit, but more importantly, it turned semiconductors into a global industry. It is often said that "without Fairchild, there would be no Silicon Valley today." This statement is not an exaggeration. You should know that in the late 1960s, when IT giants from all over the world gathered for a meeting, they found that 90% of them had worked at Fairchild. And because people in it kept going out to start businesses, there were subsidiaries or grandchild companies everywhere. As of 2017, there were as many as 100 large and medium-sized companies that were directly or indirectly separated from Fairchild, including well-known companies such as Intel and AMD.
When talking about Fairchild, we have to mention a date, September 18, 1957. On that day, eight well-known semiconductor experts, including Noyce, who invented the integrated circuit, Moore, who proposed Moore's Law, and Kleiner, who founded the famous investment fund Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, collectively submitted their resignation reports to their then boss Shockley and left Shockley Semiconductor.
This day was later called one of the ten most important days in human history by the New York Times because they founded Fairchild and created a huge industry.
At that time, in the eyes of Shockley, who had a "dictatorial" style, these eight people were not just resigning, but students betraying their teacher, or to put it more seriously, they were betraying their teachers and ancestors, so he called these eight people the "Eight Traitors."
However, with the future development of semiconductors and IT, the word "traitor" has become a positive word in Silicon Valley culture, representing an entrepreneurial spirit that rebels against tradition.
So, back to the current wave of resignations at OpenAI, although many key personnel have left OpenAI, these people are also the ones who spread the flame in the field of AI, and it is entirely possible that they will promote the tremendous development of AI in the future.
Finally, I am curious about why these people chose to announce their resignation on August 6th?
Then I looked up some information and found that there was only one well-known event in the world on this day in history. That was on August 6, 1945, when the United States dropped an atomic bomb called "Little Boy" on Hiroshima, Japan. This was the first use of nuclear weapons in human history.
Of course, no matter how turbulent OpenAI is, it is actually their own business. For the entire AI ecosystem, it may be a good thing.
