A Chaotic Weekend for OpenAI and What it Means for Announcements from DevDay 2023

It’s been a tumultuous 72 hours for OpenAI.  

On Friday, Nov. 17, 2023, the OpenAI board ousted CEO Sam Altman. Then this weekend there were rumors that the board may reverse itself and ask Altman to return. Fast-forward to Monday morning, and Microsoft announced Altman is joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. The whole situation is unfortunate – frankly, the OpenAI Board was not thoughtful about their actions, and the blast radius is wide.

This all comes mere weeks after OpenAI held its highly anticipated inaugural developer conference on November 6, 2023, in San Francisco, assembling developers from around the world to exchange ideas and get a preview of new tools and capabilities. From the rollout of custom GPTs to their “Assistants” API and multimodal capabilities, there was plenty to entice developers and excite clients as they plan their AI journey.  

What does today’s news mean for OpenAI and its users? On the positive side, Microsoft will now eventually have a dedicated competitor to OpenAI - and likely one with a faster product release strategy.

On the negative side, near-term OpenAI releases might be delayed given the turnover and shuffle, and future funding of OpenAI could be impacted if MSFT is building a competitor (even if that competitor will need a significant amount of time to catch up).  

BlueFlame is proud to help our clients take advantage of today’s most innovative Large Language Models (LLMs) like OpenAI. Our platform can be configured to use any LLM to give our clients the fastest response times and latest capabilities - while ensuring it meets their specific security needs.

We’re focused on bringing the latest innovations from OpenAI and other LLMs to our clients with the translation they need to make these solutions work for the alternative investment industry. If and when Microsoft launches their own foundational models, we are positioned to (and excited to) incorporate those.

Regardless of the turmoil, we are closely monitoring several of the top announcements from OpenAI DevDay we think will have the most impact for our clients:

1. GPT-4 Turbo

The new GPT-4 Turbo model is faster, more accurate, and allows for a larger context window. That means BlueFlame clients can put larger documents into the platform and get better quality results faster. The updated knowledge window also includes world events up to April 2023. With the improved quality and results we expect from GPT-4 Turbo, our clients will no longer need to use GPT 3.5. GPT-4 Turbo is in gated preview now, and we’ll use this throughout BlueFlame once it’s fully released (which may now be delayed in light of the OpenAI news).

2. Vision Multimodal Capability

The multimodal capabilities in the platform can span across text, audio, video and images. BlueFlame expects to leverage the vision multimodal capability to process charts such as waterfall charts within deal and research activities. Our clients can use this new feature to make data and insights much more accessible without a raw data table underneath it. OpenAI also added audio embedding, search and transcription and search in content, which will let users search for video files or podcasts.

3. Assistants API

The Assistants API has received a lot of media attention already. It lets developers build powerful AI assistants within their own applications, which OpenAI describes as a step toward helping developers build “agent-like experiences” within their apps. These assistants can take specific instructions, tap into outside knowledge and call AI models and tools to perform tasks.

The new Code Interpreter that powers the Assistants API will eventually bring dynamic data analysis to our clients - but the use cases are still a bit contrived at this point, particularly given speed of the agents. We’re excited to follow developments here and the real world benefits it could deliver for the alts space. We anticipate that Code Interpreter will allow for more advanced analysis such as cohort and retention analysis.  

BlueFlame will continue integrating the latest and greatest capabilities from all LLMs and leverage them throughout the BlueFlame platform to give our clients the specific AI solutions they need to drive significant time savings and efficiency gains.  

What did you think of the news and the announcements at OpenAI DevDay, and what new capabilities are most exciting to you? Contact us to share your thoughts and let us show you how BlueFlame is tailoring these generative AI capabilities for the alternative investment space. Request a demo today!

P.S. – Our hearts are with the employees of OpenAI: they’ve done nothing but a lot of hard work on a really incredible product and tool, and they were close to a well-earned opportunity for a financial exit. The Board’s actions not only derailed that, but potentially blew up the value of their entire investment.  Even if one were to believe that a leadership change was necessary, the way it was conducted wasn’t the least bit fair to them: it was poorly timed and executed to say the least. Not including your financial backers in this kind of decision-making was, frankly, arrogant. Any executive change needs a lot of thought and planning, and this felt incredibly impulsive.