The Sam Altman drama points to a deeper split in the tech world

Openai's corporate structure straddles the divide.

Founded as a non-profit in 2015, the firm carved out a for-profit subsidiary three years later to finance its need for expensive computing capacity and brainpower in order to propel the technology forward. Satisfying the competing aims of doomers and boomers would always be difficult.

The split, in part, reflects philosophical differences. Many in the doomer camp are influenced by "effective altruism", a movement concerned with the possibility of AI wiping out all of humanity.

The worriers include Dario Amodei, who left Openai to start up Anthropic, another model-maker. Other big tech firms, including Microsoft, also worry about AI safety, but not as doomery.

Effective accelerationism

Boomers espouse a worldview called "effective accelerationism," which counters that not only should the development of AI be allowed to proceed unhindered, but it should also be sped up.

 Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a venture-capital firm, leads the charge. Other AI boffins appear to sympathise with the cause. Meta's Yann LeCun, Andrew Ng, and several startups, including Hugging Face and Mistral AI, have argued for less restrictive regulation.

Mr Altman seemed to sympathise with both groups, publicly calling for "guardrails" to make AI safe while pushing Openai to develop more robust models and launch new tools, such as an app store for users to build their chatbots. 

Its largest investor, Microsoft, which has pumped over $10bn into Openai for a 49% stake without receiving any board seats in the parent company, is said to be unhappy, having found out about the sacking only minutes before Mr Altman did. That may be why the company offered Mr Altman and his colleagues a home.

Yet, there appears to be more going on than abstract philosophy. As it happens, the two groups are also split along more commercial lines. Doomers are early movers in the AI race, have deeper pockets and espouse proprietary models. Conversely, boomers are more likely to be firms catching up, are smaller and prefer open-source software.

Early winners

Start with the early winners.

Openai's Chatgpt added 100m users in just two months after its launch, closely trailed by Anthropic, founded by defectors from Openai and now valued at $25bn.

Researchers at Google wrote the original paper on large language models, software trained on vast quantities of data, and which underpins chatbots, including Chatgpt. The firm has been churning out bigger and smarter models and a chatbot called Bard.

Microsoft's lead, meanwhile, is built mainly on its big bet on Openai. Amazon plans to invest up to $4bn in Anthropic. But in tech, moving first doesn't always guarantee success. New entrants have ample opportunities to disrupt incumbents in a market where technology and demand are advancing rapidly.

This may give added force to the doomers' push for stricter rules. In testimony to America's Congress in May, Mr Altman expressed fears that the industry could "cause significant harm to the world" and urged policymakers to enact specific regulations for AI.

In the same month, a group of 350 AI scientists and tech executives, including from Openai, Anthropic and Google, signed a one-line statement warning of a "risk of extinction" posed by AI on a par with nuclear war and pandemics.

Despite the terrifying prospects, none of the companies that backed the statement paused their work on building more potent AI models.

Politicians are scrambling to show that they take the risks seriously. In July, President Joe Biden's administration nudged seven leading model-makers, including Microsoft, Openai, Meta and Google, to make "voluntary commitments'', to have their AI products inspected by experts before releasing them to the public.

On November 1st, the British government got a similar group to sign another non-binding agreement that allowed regulators to test their AI products for trustworthiness and harmful capabilities, such as endangering national security.

Days beforehand, Mr Biden issued an executive order with far more bite. It compels any AI company building models above a certain size—defined by the computing power needed by the software—to notify the government and share its safety-testing results.

Future of open-source AI

Another fault line between the two groups is the future of open-source AI. llms have been either proprietary, like the ones from Openai, Anthropic and Google, or open-source. The release of llama, a model Meta created in February, spurred activity in open-source AI (see chart).

Supporters argue that open-source models are safer because they are open to scrutiny.​ Detractors worry that making these powerful AI models public will allow bad actors to use them for malicious purposes.

But the row over open source may also reflect commercial motives. Venture capitalists, for instance, are big fans of it, perhaps because they spy a way for the startups they back to catch up to the frontier or gain free access to models.

Incumbents may fear the competitive threat. A memo written by insiders at Google that was leaked in May admits that open-source models are achieving results on some tasks comparable to their proprietary cousins and cost far less to build. The memo concludes that neither Google nor Openai has any defensive "moat" against open-source competitors.

So far, regulators seem to have been receptive to the doomers' argument. Mr Biden's executive order could put the brakes on open-source AI.

The order's broad definition of "dual-use" models, which can have both military or civilian purposes, imposes complex reporting requirements on the makers of such models, which may, in time, capture open-source models too.

The extent to which these rules can be enforced today is unclear. But they could gain teeth over time, say, if new laws are passed.

Not every big tech firm falls neatly on either side of the divide. The decision by Meta to open-source its AI models has made it an unexpected champion of startups by giving them access to a powerful model on which to build innovative products.

Meta is betting that the surge in innovation prompted by open-source tools will eventually help it generate newer forms of content that keep its users hooked and its advertisers happy. Apple is another outlier.

The world's largest tech firm is notably silent about AI.  At the launch of a new iPhone in September, the company paraded numerous AI-driven features without mentioning the term. When prodded, its executives lean towards extolling "machine learning", another term for AI.

That looks smart.

The Openai meltdown shows how damaging the culture wars over AI can be. But it is these wars that will shape how the technology progresses, how it is regulated—and who comes away with the spoils.