OpenAI said in a blog post about the release that it saw “no strong evidence of abuse so far”, but added that it was impossible to “remain aware of all the threats”. Most people never used GPT-2, because OpenAI never injected it into viral chatbots.
For someone writing about this at the time, it was shocking to see all this go on. OpenAI seemed like small potatoes, but it was also producing creepy AI technology, and making a public image shift from a computer lab advertising its nervousness about damaging a hair on someone’s head to a computer lab that needed to send something over as soon as possible because it was clearly promising someone, that they were going to get rich.
The discovery of documents from Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft has provided a small window into what was really going on inside Microsoft during this bizarre time for this strange company, and how the changes have turned OpenAI into the money-hungry beast it is today, with revenues growing tenfold between 2023 and 2025.
GeekWire’s Todd Bishop dug through a cache of emails, memos, texts, and the like from Microsoft and OpenAI, and what he found was shocking. Microsoft, and especially CEO Satya Nadella, had invested heavily in OpenAI by then, and they were not quiet during OpenAI’s uneasy transition to profitability. Nor were they shy of the need to make money as quickly as possible. None of this should be a surprise, but it still makes for interesting reading.
During the hiatus where GPT-2 sat without release and OpenAI had recently become a limited nonprofit, Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer, Amy Hood, spoke about the company’s concerns about that “capped” portion. “Given that the limit is actually larger than 90% of public companies, I’m not sure it’s too restrictive nor too charitable, but it’s a call on Sam’s hat,” he wrote in a July 14 email to a group including Nadella.
GPT-3, which was even more exciting than GPT-2, was released in 2020, and the first version of OpenAI’s language model, Dall-E, was released in January 2021. The following month, Microsoft and OpenAI were negotiating an additional injection of funds from Microsoft, and Sam Altman wrote an email to Microsoft saying, “We want to do everything we can to make you all commercially successful and are happy to move significantly beyond the term sheet,” and added that he wanted to. We want you all to get a ton of money as quickly as possible and get you excited about making this additional investment soon.”
In November 2022, ChatGPT was released, and as you know, all the rage. In January 2023, Nadella sent Altman a text message, asking, “When do you think you will activate your paid subscription to ChatGPT?”
Altman said he was “expecting to be ready by the end of January, but we can be flexible beyond that. The only real reason to do it sooner is because we’re out of capacity and providing a poor user experience,” and asked “Any preference on when we’ll do it?”
Nadella replied, “Let me think about it and consider. Overall it is best to establish it as soon as possible.” Two weeks later, they followed up and asked “How many members have you guys added to ChatGPT?”
Three days later, the paid version of ChatGPT launched.
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