Chaos in A.I. Land

EVERYTHING THAT’S CHANGED SINCE FRIDAY

In the past 72 hours, OpenAI has fired its CEO, its President quit in solidarity, it named an interim CEO, tried to get the original CEO back, named another interim CEO, then the original CEO and President were hired by Microsoft.

In case you spent your weekend doing anything but constantly scrolling your feeds to keep up with the lightning-fast-moving drama, here’s a quick recap to get you caught up, and a few thoughts on why you should (or shouldn’t) care about it all.

As I’m sure that you’ll remember, OpenAI is home to the fastest-growing product that has ever existed: ChatGPT. Recent surveys show that it’s become so popular that over 80% of business people have tried using it to make their work more efficient.

The company has been led by Sam Altman, the latest messianic tech CEO who has been appearing on the cover of every business publication. Previously the head of legendary Silicon Valley incubator Y Combinator, Altman raised the profile of OpenAI as well as billions of dollars of investment, much of it coming from their largest partner, Microsoft.

On Friday afternoon, the small board at OpenAI informed Altman that he would be fired as CEO, and released a cryptic press release saying that Sam “was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities.” The statement caused a firestorm of speculation ranging from personal scandal to conflicts of interest.

Almost immediately, Greg Brockman — OpenAI’s President — resigned in solidarity with Altman, and many (many) more people from inside the company openly posted messages that they would be following closely behind.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella received a heads up, exactly one minute before the firing, that all of this would be going down, and he sprang into action, campaigning for OpenAI to reinstate Altman as CEO, effective undoing all of the drama up until that point. So they tried. Terms were negotiated and a Sunday afternoon deadline was set, where the board would make concessions that Sam would accept in order to return. The deadline came and went without any resolution.

Then suddenly, Microsoft dropped the biggest bombshell of all: They had hired both Altman and Brockman to lead a brand new AI Research division within Microsoft.

As I’m sure you can imagine, articles claiming scoops, opinion pieces, and long threads were being furiously published, then edited or deleted as the story developed, then redeveloped, but this was the biggest story yet.

And then, this morning, the OpenAI team dropped a letter signed by 550 of their 700 total employees that included the following banger of a quote: “Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI. We are unable to work for people that lack competence…”

Now this story is far from resolved, so where does that leave the 80% of us who have started to use ChatGPT in our daily work? I think that it’s time to hedge our bets.

ChatGPT is still, by far, the most advanced generative AI tool, but it’s not the only game in town. Rather than become entirely dependant on a single company that is in complete chaos right now, we should all be looking to get familiar with at least one other tool. To help get you started, here are the most significant and similar tools that could take the place of ChatGPT in your productivity toolkit:

• Claude by Anthropic — started by a team of ex-OpenAI engineers after a previous dramatic (but much less publicized) departure of staff. Billed as the open and responsible AI company, their tool will feel familiar, if maybe a step or two behind ChatGPT in terms of features.
• Bard by Google — until this weekend, AI dominance was a two-horse race where Google had more experience, people, and resources, but OpenAI had moved more quickly. Now, Google looks like the dependable option, and their Bard tool the safest bet in AI.
• Bing Chat — this will be the most interesting to watch, because Bing (owned by Microsoft) uses OpenAI’s engine to power its AI tool, and it’s really good. Microsoft has said that they’re going to continue the partnership, but since they’re also building their own AI company headed up by OpenAI’s old CEO, we can expect to see big developments in the way that Microsoft presents its AI tools.
• Pi, by Inflection AI — a bit of a curve ball, but a useful tool nonetheless. Reid Hoffman — previously of Linkedin/PayPal — launched Pi to be an AI assistant that you can have a real, human-style conversation with, and that can help you to work through real-world problems. It’s the warmer, friendlier AI assistant, but also lacks some of the more advanced features.

Or, you could put your hands over your ears and just forge on with ChatGPT, and that would be a totally reasonable thing to do.

If anything, this weekend was just a great reminder that the AI space is a rocket ship that has gone from science fiction to the world’s most-used tool in less than a year, so of course there are going to be power struggles. The best thing we can all be doing for our own businesses is using tools when they serve us without becoming entirely dependant on them, because, if tech has taught us anything, it’s that the faster things grow, the faster they can flip everything upside down on us.

CUSTOM GPTs ARE STILL AMAZING

AND OPENAI MAKES THE BEST

While its leadership may be in chaos, the ability to program your own GPT is a game changer. For example, Junction is currently in the process of hiring our next Partner Success Manager, and we were already able to take the documentation and turn it into a Partner Success Manager Assistant, and it works shockingly well.

Here’s how we set it up:

• In the Explore menu, clicked on Create a GPT
• Explained to the GPT what it is, what it’s supposed to do, and added details like tone and style
• Uploaded documents that detail the various parts of the job – your version could be SOPs, or an employee handbook
• Ran a bunch of tests and gave the bot feedback about how it should adjust its answers

All of that took about an hour, and now our new team member is going to have their very own assistant to help them navigate our processes.

Of course, we’re taking this all with a grain of salt for now, but I’m very interested to hear whether the assistant actually makes our lives easier. I’ll report back after we’ve tried it out for a few weeks.

To learn more about how to set up your own GPT, check out this guide written by Zapier.

REELS ACCOUNTS FOR HALF OF ALL TIME SPENT ON IG

IF YOU’RE NOT CREATING REELS, YOU’RE MISSING HALF OF THE FUN

In a recent Instagram story posted by boss Adam Mosseri, he answered the question “Do Reels get ranked higher than other posts?” Instead of addressing it directly, he revealed that more than half of the total amount of time spent on Instagram these days is from people watching Reels.

In summary: Yes, Reels get ranked higher.

Whether we like it or not, we should all be shifting the way that we think about IG to be at least as much about video content as it is about images.

And, as if on cue, Instagram has released a whole bunch of new tools that make it easier to edit, crop, rotate, and otherwise mess with individual frames from your Reel, all within the app.

ADS THAT ACTUALLY WORK

JUST IN TIME FOR THE HOLIDAYS

More ads will be purchased over the next 6 weeks than at any time throughout the rest of the year, so we wanted to bring you some useful resources that can help to make sure that yours are at the top of your game.

• First, we’ve got a guide from Hubspot that shows 10 different Facebook ads that they believe are effective, including what’s working and why. Use this guide as a thought starter for any of your social ads this season.
• Next, Search Engine Land broke down exactly what’s working and what’s not on Google Ads. Spoiler: A lot has changed, and it’s (in some ways) easier than ever to run really good Google Ads right now.
• Don’t want to spend any money, but still want to drive traffic? Here’s a guide to writing blog posts that will get found as quickly as possible.

A FEW MORE STORIES WORTH A CLICK

STUFF THAT WILL MAKE YOU JUST A BIT SMARTER THIS WEEK

• Meta has new lead gen ads, so it published a guide to help us use them effectively
• Pinterest has been fairly regularly making improvements to its analytics tool – here’s how to use it
• Thought Yelp was dead? Think again – it’s up 12% this year
• Instagram’s beautifully designed, but under-appreciated, feature “Guides” is going away next month

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting