Predicting AI's Future with ChatGPT after Sam Altman's Exit

Who will win the race towards AGI and what are the odds?

There’s a lot of people making predictions about the AI world after Sam Altman was fired by board of OpenAI. The vast majority of people in tech believe that Sam Altman will beat out OpenAI with a new competitive organization.

So I decided to ask ChatGPT a few questions.

Question 1: What are the odds that a new AI competitor led by Sam Altman and Greg Brockton would supersede OpenAI?

Tech figures on twitter believe it's an absolute certainty that a new Sam Altman would win. The odds form ChatGPT seem more reasonable to me. The overstating of the odds for Sam Altman is likely a product of being the previous president at YC. As a result, there is a large and loud group of supporters who are overestimating the importance of Sam Altman.

Question 2: What is the number of AI researchers with AI knowledge similar to Ilya Sutskever that could rebuild openAI from scratch given enough compute resources?

One point I think a lot of people are missing is the rarity of top tier AI researchers. There are not many people comparable to Ilya Sutskever. In some sense, these researchers are even more valuable than compute.

Question 3: How much money would a new Sam Altman and Greg Brockman startup need?

This estimate seems about right. It also speaks to the expense of creating a leading foundational AI company given the expenses associated with compute currently.

Question 4: How much did Cohere or Anthropic odds of superseding OpenAI increase after Sam Altman and Greg Brockman's exit from OpenAI?

People assume that an Altman and Brockman NewCo will be the default new victor and beneficiary. The biggest winners might be Cohere and Anthropic.

Question 5: What about Apple and Meta superseding OpenAI?

Meta and Apple are right around Cohere and Anthropic with Meta being especially competitive. As Meta and Apple get more data from spatial computing efforts and AI integrations. I personally think Meta’s odds are are a little better. Apple seems high but it also has nearly infinite financial resources to make up for in ChatGPT’s mind.

My final thoughts. If ChatGPT is accurate, we are looking at a relatively even six horse race at the moment at the foundational AI layer. Altman and Brockman’s odds are solid but no where near as certain as the tech elite make it out to be on twitter. Top experienced AI researchers are vastly undervalued at the moment given how few there are.

What are your thoughts?