OpenAI’s Chaos Energy
In its life so far, OpenAI has accomplished any number of feats, including the releases of ChatGPT, Dall-E and Sora. Those tools, which craft words, pictures and videos with AI, have catalyzed an unprecedented boom time.
Those breakthroughs cast a radiant glow on OpenAI, and steadily, it collected more money faster than any startup ever from everyone who matters in Silicon Valley—never mind that some of its products flout both copyright law and good taste in nearly equal measure. And never mind that OpenAI’s board once spontaneously fired (and quickly rehired) its wunderkind CEO, an event that internally has been rebranded as “The Blip.” (I kid you not—that’s according to our star AI reporter, Stephanie Palazzolo.)
For the better part of three years, OpenAI enjoyed an enviable perception of itself. The startup’s rise seemed both predestined and inextinguishable.
Recently, though, the grand narrative about OpenAI has slipped out of the company’s hands, and its continued dominance no longer seems assured. For a good moment, I found this turn of events surprising. Later, I had to laugh at myself for falling for an OpenAI ploy, which I’ve come to consider the company’s actual greatest achievement to date: In retrospect, it’s astounding that it managed to convince a lot of people of its invincibility while a pile of evidence mounted showing that it runs on a stream of chaotic energy. On a list of reliable fuels, such a power source would rank near Iranian-refined plutonium.
I detected a strong sense of that volatility as I edited this week’s Big Read, which is about OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman and his wife, Anna. Mostly, the piece delves into their foray into MAGA land and national politics. And there alone, I sense a good amount of chaos: Brockman, apparently, hasn’t ever held any strong political beliefs, and the donations mostly seem like an opportunistic bid to win favor with President Donald Trump, a fella as swayable as a weathervane in gale-force wind. So who knows what Brockman’s money will actually get him and what exactly it may cost him in the long run?
Our story does a good job of filling in the rest of the picture around the couple. Some of those details I must’ve known at one point but have since forgotten, like the fact that OpenAI has 11 co-founders. Eleven! Think of that chaos. I have a group chat with my friends that’s about the same size, and often we’re lucky if we can reach consensus on whether to arrive for brunch at 12:30 or 1. God forbid we try to arrive together on a definition of what constitutes humanlike AI.
Most of those 11 have left: Brockman and just two other co-founders still remain at OpenAI. I totally get why the others decamped. Chaos can get tiring. I’m very used to making brunch plans for 12 and eventually sitting down at a table for four. As Brockman has stayed, he and OpenAI have weathered plenty of internal strife. In 2024, for example, OpenAI and Brockman agreed he should take a sabbatical; there’d been complaints about his workplace combativeness. Three months later, he returned—shortly after another key executive, Mira Murati, left to begin a rival AI startup, Thinking Machines Lab. Chaos!
In the last few days, OpenAI has grasped to retake control of its story. Shortly, it plans to launch ads, which might offer the same type of energy jolt you get from a mouthful of 6-milligram Zyns, and it has installed a new leader to shape the products it will sell to businesses. Meanwhile on X, one executive was complaining about a “narrative violation”—a corporate dog whistle meant to suggest unfair media coverage—regarding the company’s recent growth figures.
Will OpenAI recapture its former status quo? I’d like to think we’ve seen enough stories like our Big Read to make us all at least a liiittle bit more skeptical. Then again, all those Sora videos have left reality feeling rather permanently warped.