The big drama at OpenAI might have come to an end with the return of Sam Altman joining back the company, but a lot of damage has already been done. While Altman was away and the company was going through a great change, the competitors were busy acquiring its customers and throwing cast nets at employees.

During the turmoil, ChatGPT faced down time along with API services, which forced several users to explore alternatives like Anthropic, Cohere, and many other open-source options. Nevertheless, OpenAI’s team promptly resolved the issue. 

There were a lot of reports that said that more than 100+ OpenAI customers were already in talks with its competitors, including Google, Amazon and Oracle’s billion dollar babies Anthropic and Cohere, respectively. Moreover, a significant number of OpenAI customers were contemplating a transition to Microsoft’s Azure services, attracted by the availability of OpenAI models and other similar  alternatives.

On the other hand, executives of Salesforce and NVIDIA attempted to recruit OpenAI’s employees. Marc Benioff, Salesforce CEO said that Salesforce would match the full cash and equity OTE for any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation, encouraging them to immediately join the Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese.

Rivals Smell Opportunity

In a bid to challenge OpenAI and attract its customers, the competitors announced back to back updates.

Yesterday, Anthropic launched Claude 2.1, boasting a 200K context length. It outperforms OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo which comes with 128K context and has significant reductions in model hallucination rates, system prompts, along with the addition of a new beta feature. Morgan Stanley, one of the earliest customers of OpenAI, is currently in touch with Anthropic. 

Simultaneously, Oracle’s billion-dollar baby, Cohere introduced fresh fine-tuning capabilities and an updated user interface. The new UI incorporates a testing playground for users to experiment and validate fine-tuned models. Additionally, it features a pricing calculator, empowering users to make well-informed decisions regarding fine-tuning costs from the outset.

Langchain, whose existence was questioned when OpenAI launched the GPT Store at DevDay, has suddenly come to life and made a slew of announcements. For instance, Dream, one of Langchain’s products, allows users to use an AI no-code tool to build fully functional web apps and components using natural language, similar to what GPT Builder does. 

Not only that, it also introduced the ‘GPT-Crawler template,’ which helps in easily building chat assistants for websites.

Elon Musk, one of the founders of OpenAI, has recently intensified efforts with xAI’s Grok, a chatbot developed by Musk’s team in just four months. He announced that access to Grok will be gradually opened in phases, prioritised based on users’ sign-up dates for X Premium+. Furthermore, Grok will be accessible within the X app.

OpenAI got lucky 

Despite the turmoil, OpenAI’s team managed to stay ahead of competitors. In the midst of chaos, they rolled out a new update to ChatGPT, enabling users to interact and receive responses through voice rather than text.

Moreover, as per the latest developments, it seems that none of OpenAI’s employees are planning to leave now that Altman is back and OpenAI is safe and sound. Greg Brockman posted a picture on X with OpenAI’s team for assurance. 

However, for Altman’s arrival, as per the agreement, it is mentioned that both him and Brockman won’t hold positions on the company’s board.  Altman has also committed to an internal inquiry into reported conduct that led to the board’s decision to remove him. 

Despite this, there are still many unanswered questions about why Sam rejoined OpenAI and the details behind his return. Meanwhile one thing is for sure during the whole OpenAI’s saga, enterprises utilising its services learned a crucial lesson that relying solely on one vendor is not a safe option.