The biggest shock in the tech world since the arrival of ChatGPT was … the death of its inventors. Almost.
In 2022, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAi brought havoc to the tech space when he stepped into the light as the frontman for ChatGPT. It literally changed the world.
Not only kickstarting the AI revolution (again) but reinventing the whole genre by thrusting Large Language Models (LLM) front and centre and subtly pushing aside the nirvana of General Inteliigence to favour deep-learning married with generative on-demand use for a prosumer marketplace.
Interest in ChatGPT drove big tech scrambling to add “AI” to every product line possible and bubbled the tech stocks so heavily that the big 6 dragged the whole S&P500 into positive territory despite almost every other stock in the index slumping. Cheers.
But, what’s this got to do with Metas Twitter-Clone, threads?
Last weekend we got to watch one of the most promising new tech companies the world has seen for a decade committed to abrupt and immediate hari-kari as Sam got fired.
And this all happened on TwitterX, live to the waiting world. We watched him get fired, the backlash, the shark pool, the late attempts to gloss over the fuck up and then, on Sunday, OpenAI’s board (more on them later) desperate scramble to get him back.
With not to much as a twitch on Threads, this played out in glorious public technicolor on X. The various players and ego traded blows, insults and love across the Twitter-sphere. It was magnificent and the final bell tolled when the boss of Microsoft offered Sam a job and unlimited funding to create his own AI offering under the Microsoft banner.
Sam took the job and gave the finger to OpenAI. And OpenAI lost favour and exclusive funding from it’s 49% shareholder … Microsoft. It’ll make a great film in a few years time.
In the meantime, Meta Threads was probably talking about Taylor Swift or some such shit that no-one cares about. Twitter / X cemented its hold on serious communication and Threads took its next step to irrelevance and mediocrity.
Farewell Threads. Farewell OpenAI. And welcome the return of the tech-feudal Microsoft and half a decade of upheaval for Google, Apple, and serious questions for Meta to answer.
