Sam Altman and the Attention Economy

As you may have heard Sam Altman has been fired by the board of OpenAI. This of course leads to a number of creators on YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok spending a large amount of time speculating on why Sam Altman was fired. A lot of the content was Hollywood reporter-type material such as “He is dating her and they’re in a film together” and so on.

Some of the content was also quite wrong. One post on TikTok claimed the reason was that OpenAI was using data from the Chinese military and Satya Nadella was not okay with that arrangement. This reporter also claimed the news was brought first to President Joe Biden via Premier Xi. If you can believe that I have a bridge to sell you.

All this speculation and over-saturation of content I understand does serve a purpose for those creating the content. That is, they need to be first with the story to gain followers, and the more content they put out around this event the more likely they are to gain followers and viewers of their content.

This is just not how I have planned my content strategy. I am working to create a newsletter that offers insights on the business of AI and news on the latest research that could be relevant to your business or just as a hobbyist interested in knowing more about the workings of AI. I am working to offer a different newsletter that offers insight you may have a hard time finding otherwise. That is how I am positioning myself. But I also recognize that it is helpful sometimes to offer a bit of regular news in the mix too.

My goal is to offer a worthwhile newsletter that gives you something to think about each time you read an issue. That may include a new tool that is uniquely useful, a new open source repo or anything else that would be of use to creators, hobbyists or anyone interested in the business of AI.

So, moving forward my plan is to offer two editions per week. One would be Monday/Tuesday and the second would be Thursday/Friday. I will offer two or three important news briefings and then a deeper dive into the main topic for the current edition of the newsletter.