Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

November 21 (Xinhua)-- Ilya Sutskever, board member and chief scientist of artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, expressed regret over his involvement in firing CEO Sam Altman on Monday, local time, and questions about OpenAI's future intensified. To make matters worse, OpenAI's customers are looking for an exit, suggesting that the company could lose a lot of business and eventually decline.

Over the weekend, more than 100 OpenAI customers contacted OpenAI's rival Anthropic, a start-up that has raised billions of dollars from Amazon and Google in recent months. In addition, Google (Google) and OpenAI rival startup Cohere were contacted. Many OpenAI customers are also considering switching to Microsoft's Azure service, which provides copies of OpenAI models and other models, according to people familiar with the matter.

However, OpenAI investors remained hopeful on Monday that Altman would return to OpenAI, according to people familiar with the matter.

Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley, a big client of OpenAI, planned to shift more artificial intelligence software to Microsoft's Azure, which hosts the ChatGPT version of OpenAI, long before Mr Altman was fired, according to another person familiar with the matter. Morgan Stanley also maintained regular contact with Anthropic before Altman was fired, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The ongoing crisis at OpenAI has put more pressure on the Wall Street firm to diversify with other artificial intelligence providers, according to people familiar with the matter. Morgan Stanley was one of OpenAI's earliest and most important corporate clients, and the relationship was largely brokered by Altman.

While clients are considering leaving, OpenAI employees are preparing to rebel against the board. On Monday, most of OpenAI's more than 700 employees, including Suzkyver, senior product director Mira Murati and co-founder John Schulman, signed an open letter threatening to resign and join Microsoft if the board does not reinstate Olman.

Companies in technology, finance and other industries, which have linked their artificial intelligence product roadmaps to OpenAI's technology, were uneasy when the start-up's leadership crisis surfaced over the weekend. Many people are particularly concerned that OpenAI's board does not seem to care about the start-up's business interests, including those of customers or shareholders, but its non-profit mission to put "security" above rapid technological progress, according to people familiar with the matter.

While some of OpenAI's clients have previously negotiated with other artificial intelligence startups, recent discussions have focused on Altman's dismissal and its potential impact on their business. Financial companies have specifically expressed their concern that if Altman is ousted because of possible data privacy issues, it could hurt their business, the person said.

Microsoft, which has invested more than $10 billion in OpenAI in exchange for access to the latter technology, will be the main beneficiary of the upheaval. Microsoft has sold copies of the OpenAI model on its Azure cloud service, a product that competes directly with OpenAI. Microsoft salespeople have been trying in recent months to persuade OpenAI's existing customers to switch to Azure, saying it has more security and compliance guarantees, according to people familiar with the business.

This follows media reports that Morgan Stanley signed an agreement with Microsoft last month to use Microsoft's Azure OpenAI service. Morgan Stanley's collaboration with OpenAI dates back to 2021, when OpenAI began building customized copies of its GPT-4 model, which was trained by Morgan Stanley's proprietary market intelligence data to build a chat robot that could quickly answer questions from wealth managers and provide actual information about the market. OpenAI has previously viewed Morgan Stanley as a classic example of how its technology can help a large, mature company expand its business.

Competitors are looking for ways to benefit from the dramatic changes that have taken place in OpenAI. When OpenAI announced the dismissal of Altman on Friday afternoon, employees of Amazon cloud services AWS and Anthropic began discussing how to win business from OpenAI's biggest customer. Anthropic has received billions of dollars in investment from AWS.

AWS has set up a special team to work with Anthropic and respond to inquiries from OpenAI customers. Over the weekend, AWS and Anthropic discussed how to sell their services to several OpenAI clients, including Snap, Morgan Stanley and Wall Street trading firm Jane Street. At least one AWS salesperson said the companies had put pressure on OpenAI customers to act quickly. Anthropic didn't respond to a request for comment, and Amazon didn't immediately comment.

Smaller OpenAI customers are also looking for other options. Rabi Gupta, chief executive and co-founder of EvaBot, a San Francisco-based artificial intelligence sales start-up, is using OpenAI to test new AI tools on behalf of big clients, including multibillion-dollar companies. He has begun to explore other options and he will begin to diversify outside the platform.

"We are very anxious and not sure what will happen," Gupta said. " The company has requested access to Anthropic and plans to try some open source models, such as Google Bard and Meta Llama 2. The entrepreneur uses OpenAI's GPT-4 to analyze unstructured data, such as research reports and minutes of earnings meetings, to find information to improve the effectiveness of his sales prospects calls.

The upheaval at OpenAI has prompted Gupta to rethink the way he builds his business, including not relying on a single technology platform. "this is not our top priority," he said. "my whole idea was to get revenue, get customers, and then focus on training our own big language models. But now, training our own big models has become a top priority."

Wasim Waseem Daher, chief executive of bookkeeping start-up Pilot, another client, said at the weekend that there were long-standing questions about the impact of Altman and Brockmann, co-founder, former president and chairman of OpenAI, leaving OpenAI, but that it had not yet had a direct impact on his business. Pilot uses OpenAI's technology to help customers with accounting and financial statements.

"this upheaval is full of drama and has had a real impact," Mr Dach said. "however, drama is still the main factor at the moment. From a practical impact point of view, OpenAI's API interface is still accessible."

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