OpenAI Goes MAGA

Things were not looking great for OpenAI at the end of last year. The company had been struggling with major delays on its long-awaited GPT-5 and hemorrhaging key talent--notably, Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati, and Alec Radford, the researcher who'd set the company on the path of developing GPTs in the first place. Several people who left either joined OpenAI competitors or launched new ones. The start-up's relationship with Microsoft, its biggest backer and a crucial provider of the computing infrastructure needed to train and deploy its AI models, was being investigated by the Federal Trade Commission. And then there was Elon Musk.