Despite all the rumours around its customers exiting, leadership turmoil, employees threatening to quit and Altman’s return, there is a positive side to the OpenAI blowup that no one’s talking about. The company that gave the world ChatGPT, did a brilliant job in supporting its consumers, developers, and enterprise customers amid all the drama unfolding on X. 

“We are 100% behind OpenAI because they and their people are phenomenal – both technically and personally,” said the chief of BeMyEyes, Mike Buckley, without commenting on the board drama. 

Buckley lauded the OpenAI team, including Sam Altman, Brad Lightcap (COO), and Jessica Shieh, and said it prioritised accessibility when no one was looking, and has played a pivotal role in building their product – Be My AI™ – even though it’s close to meaningless for them from a revenue standpoint. 

“But the reason we’re sticking with OpenAI beyond just the fact that their models are excellent is because they made a commitment to BeMyEyes before it was a sexy thing to do,” he added. 

“So. About OpenAI. I’ve been bombarded by sales calls from rival LLM companies seeking some opportunistic business wins,” said the chief of BeMyEyes, Mike Buckley, adding that he understands that it is fair for them to reach out for networking, and his company was already evaluating backup providers even before all of this drama. 

“No matter what is going on, customers are being treated as #1,” said OctaneAI chief Matt Schlicht, saying that this is by far the most impressive part of OpenAI this weekend, showing the performance dashboard, which seems to be working just fine. 

“People are dming me as if OpenAI is going to turn off gpt in the next week,” said AI developer Jason. He said that people of that level of integrity towards their leader, are likely going to have the same level of an integrity with their product, their service, and their customer. 

Almost 95% of OpenAI employees had signed a petition to leave the company if Altman and Greg Brockman are not reinitiated. Surprisingly, this list includes Ilya Sutskever, who was initially blamed for the firing Altman. Now that Altman, alongside other colleagues are back, hopefully, things will be back to normal. “Returning to OpenAI & getting back to coding tonight,” said Brockman. 

Not only that, OpenAI, amid all the chaos, shipped a new update to ChatGPT, that allows all the users to interact and receive responses with the help of voice instead of text. 

Kudos to Emmett Shear as well, who played a pivotal role in reuniting the team safely, and running the show smoothly for the last ~72 hours, alongside the support of leadership team at OpenAI. Interesting to note, amid all the chaos, even Andrej Karpathy was thinking about building a centralised and decenralised AI system. 

Now that sky is clear, it feels like nothing ever happened to begin with, and everything was just a bad dream. The two million developers, including 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies (i.e. about 460 companies) that the company boasted are, hopefully, still in favour of OpenAI now that Altman has returned. 

Ironically, when the OpenAI drama unfolded, 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. Others were also considering switching to Microsoft’s Azure OpenAI Service, which mimics all its models and offerings. Not sure how much of that is true, anymore.

Clearly, OpenAI is nothing without its “customers and people”.