On Wednesday, OpenAI confirmed that Sam Altman was being restored as the CEO, bringing closure to the meandering saga at the most important GenAI company in the world. The twists and turns since his initial ouster had kept everyone in the startup community on tenterhooks.
“In general, many companies, including us too, look at multiple options – in the case of LLMs besides OpenAI there is Llama, Mistral etc too,” MapmyIndia CEO Rohan Verma told ET. “It is for this reason that many countries look at sovereign LLMs – in UAE/Saudi you can see Falcon/TII. Microsoft’s commentary about continuity of support and innovation of the OpenAI work is good but it is always good to a) have choice, b) be Aatmanirbhar. This applies to AI like it applies to maps.”
MapmyIndia’s joint product with its group company called Mappls Kogo is a customer of OpenAI.
This dependence on OpenAI explains why founders hugely invested in businesses dependent on OpenAI’s tech were extremely concerned. Krish Ramineni, co-founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai for instance told ET in an exclusive chat, how he was in the middle of signing a contract with OpenAI when the news broke out. Ramineni spoke to ET at 4:00AM PST and said that he is spending sleepless nights tracking the developments through his network and exploring to diversify his dependence through AI tech providers like Anthropic and Cohere.
“I’ve been monitoring this since the day – rather, the minute – it came out. And the reason is that we were right in the middle of working on a very big contract with OpenAI,” Ramineni said at the time. “I just had a conversation with someone at OpenAI prior to this announcement coming out. And even throughout the weekend we’ve been working with their team on deploying more tech on our end.”
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Fireflies, the generative AI startup known for its AI notetaker and meeting assistant, has recently launched its own AI Appstore which enables customers to create their own apps on top of the AI notetaker. The partnership meant that these custom apps would be able to leverage OpenAI’s tech and APIs.
“We’re investing millions of dollars into some of the projects with OpenAI. We also have special contracts and enterprise agreements in place with them,” said Ramineni.
“All of a sudden as a founder, my first question is – Is the service going to be stable? Are the new updates going to continue to come? And what if they dramatically pull back? And then my next question is, okay, so how do we not want your entire company built around one endpoint.” Fireflies’ Ramineni said.
“So I’ve already over the weekend called four, five vendors and partners. We’ve also started having in house plans too, to spin up our own LLMs if required.” He is exploring Azure, Anthropic, Cohere and open-source options like the Llama model by Meta.
Ashwini Asokan, founder and CEO of Chennai-based AI company Mad Street Den, echoed this sentiment. His company offers solutions to sectors such as retail, education, healthcare, media and finance.
“Technology being provided by OpenAI is not a risk for anyone,” she said. “But at the same time depending entirely on a single source like this absolutely puts companies at risk. It’s essential they have elaborate systems to protect themselves against systems in this singular form,” Asokan said, adding that though MSD is not a customer of OpenAI, it was therefore not impacted in any way by the turbulence at OpenAi.
Ivana Bartoletti, Global Privacy Officer, Wipro Ltd, told ET that the OpenAI episode has accentuated the importance of governance in the fast-accelerating AI space.
Accent on Governance
“On OpenAI, everyday there is something new and we will wait till the end of the story to say what that means. It is important that these things are being discussed but one important thing that this situation is showing is the importance of governance,” she said.
However, for those like conversational AI platform Haptik’s co-founder and CEO Aakrit Vaish the goings on at OpenAI did not faze him as a customer or partner of the company. The Reliance Jio-owned Haptik in February said it was integrating OpenAI’s generative AI tool, ChatGPT, with its own products.
“Whatever will happen, the core OpenAI APIs and technology will continue to survive and thrive,” Vaish said. “In a worst case scenario, there will be some sort of way in which people can easily migrate from direct OpenAI integration to Azure integration in which case you become a Microsoft customer or partner.”
Enterprise conversational AI platform Yellow.ai which is an OpenAI customer also said they were not very concerned as they are not heavily reliant on any of the AI models as they do a lot of work in the space themselves. They too advocated for companies to diversify their risk by using different technologies.
“These are the early days of AI and there might be a few disruptions but that does not mean companies need to go out and build their own infrastructure as that is not feasible,” Rashid Khan, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Yellow.ai said. “But there are options that they can exercise in terms of other LLMs and even the open source models have become decent today.”
(With inputs from Beena Parmar in Bengaluru)