It seems like OpenAI CTO Mira Murati had a pretty solid Tuesday night.
At Fortune’s Most Powerful Women Dinner in San Francisco, Murati clapped back at Elon Musk, talked up OpenAI’s commitment to privacy, touted new executive hires, discussed Apple, circumnavigated IPO questions, and overall hammered home the message that OpenAI is in its “next phase.”
All of this lines up pretty clearly with what we know to be true: that for all the day-to-day drama that OpenAI is embroiled in, the company is still very clearly at the top of the AI heap.
So sure, call it the company’s “next phase” as Murati does, but what I’d argue is that there’s something more nuanced going on right now: OpenAI’s path forward is clearing. After Sam Altman’s November boardroom saga, the AI startup now seems to have so many newsworthy irons in the fire that they might outshine and overshadow all that troublesome “old news.”
Take OpenAI’s partnership with Apple, which launched this week—Murati spent time at the dinner talking about privacy, as OpenAI and Apple start the process of integrating ChatGPT into features on iPhones. “We’re trying to be as transparent as possible with the public,” she said.
Elon Musk’s best effort to slime the OpenAI-Apple deal by branding it “creepy spyware” hasn’t gotten much traction, and Murati casually flicked away Musk’s assessment like a gnat on her shoulder: “That’s his opinion. Obviously I don’t think so.”
Some other Muskian clouds also cleared up on Tuesday when the billionaire—who despite cofounding OpenAI has become one of its most blazingly vocal critics—dropped his lawsuit against OpenAI. That’s got to be a relief for a startup that’s drawn reality TV levels of big-name drama. It’s impossible to know what the fate of that lawsuit would have been, but it’s clear it would have attracted the sort of headline-grabbing scrutiny OpenAI just doesn’t want while it’s trying to roll out ChatGPT in all our Siris.
All of this to say: Things are looking up for OpenAI this week, with another vaunted Big Tech endorsement on the books and an evaporated Musk lawsuit. You know how in an Indiana Jones movie, there’s usually a moment where Harrison Ford has successfully traipsed through a murky cave or slashed through a dense jungle with a machete, coming out on the other side into the light? It’s a bit like that. They've survived a giant pile of snakes, with an asterisk.
As much as OpenAI hopes to leave the tangle of troubles behind it, it’s not going to be easy. Old problems recede or resolve, new ones come to the fore and, for OpenAI, they could be equally high-profile problems: This week, for example, it was also reported that Scarlett Johansson may testify in Congress about OpenAI and its alleged use of her voice. There are still concerns about Altman’s ouster: Murati’s explanation at the Fortune dinner described it as a problem of “oversight,” but forgive me if it still sounds like there’s more to the story.
Then, there’s the tech itself, because when it comes to generative AI, the next scandal is always just one hallucination away.
Elsewhere…The Federal Reserve held interest rates steady yesterday, sending up a smoke signal that they’re only cutting rates once this year. For everyone else keeping score, we went into this year with three expected rate cuts on the theoretical books. I’ve written before that these rates are actually, when taken in historical context, not high at all. But that doesn’t mean this is easy.
This month’s cartoon…Here’s our June cartoon, by Ian Foley.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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