I believe that the controversy is really about control. Control of the motivation for growth (capitalism vs. altruism) and control of the evolution of the technology (human control of the data to which GPT is exposed). The freak out by the board was the realization that once ChatGPT had 100 million or more users the algorithms would start learning from the queries in unpredictable ways. If you've used it you know that you can progressively tune your queries to home closer and closer to a usable result. If the algorithm can learn from that series of interactions then the genie is out of the bottle. I believe that when the board realized this and further knew that Sam had known all along that this would happen they fired him because they had lost control of the algorithms and Sam. Now what? Can Skynet become self-aware? A lot of my colleagues think that it's possible. From my 20+ years experience of working with neural nets I do not believe that Neural nets can behave like human geniuses because they cannot extrapolate outside of their experience. However, much of what we ascribe as intelligent behavior of human beings is definitely within the realm of neural nets. Humans learning from experience sometimes seems as uncommon as common sense.