How Meta could benefit from the OpenAI shakeup.

Zuckerberg may not have been directly involved in the drama surrounding Sam Altman’s tumultuous departure from, then return to, OpenAI, but he could benefit from it.

The “winners” of the OpenAI executive saga have been much debated, with some experts believing Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and the OpenAI board who fired Altman on Friday are the losers.

The startup’s largest financial backer, Microsoft, has promoted Altman and his team at numerous events throughout the year as a cornerstone cloud computing partner. By doing so, it created a public association between itself and Chat GPT’s high-flying maker. However, that backfired somewhat when critics questioned how boardroom shenanigans were able to escape Nadella’s attention.

As for Meta and Zuckerberg, they watched the corporate circus from a distance. Some companies seek to diversify away from relying on a single company’s large language model, which could boost Meta’s open-source Llama AI initiatives.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT was spawned by Meta’s heavy investment in generative AI and related large language models. In the tech industry, it is considered one of the most prestigious AI research teams, along with Alphabet’s DeepMind.