Latest news with #StartupFund
IOL News
20-07-2025
- Business
- IOL News
It's Time for Digital Justice
The recent BRICS declaration on artificial intelligence marks a critical shift in the global digital agenda. In their joint statement, BRICS leaders reaffirmed each nation's sovereign right to develop and govern digital technologies, particularly AI, in alignment with domestic priorities and legal frameworks. They called for strengthened capacity-building, robust data governance, and technological autonomy, stating: 'We firmly support the right of all countries to harness the benefits of the digital economy… to develop capacities in AI research, foster technological autonomy and innovation, ensure data protection, and promote their own digital economy.' This affirmation is welcome and timely. Yet, in the face of growing digital inequality, platform gatekeeping, and regulatory imbalance, should we not be thinking about how to move beyond high-level diplomacy toward more tangible, enforceable measures? Perhaps the time has come to complement vision with action and to consider what digital justice might truly look like in practice. Across the Global South, from township entrepreneurs in South Africa to fintech innovators in Latin America, startup ecosystems remain stifled by structural imbalances in the digital economy. The current rules of engagement, largely dictated by dominant platform companies, are neither inclusive nor equitable. As a member of the SU20 Foundation and Alliance Task Force, I believe we must now reimagine global digital governance through a justice lens. This means embedding fairness, inclusion, and startup-led innovation at the core of every digital transformation policy and programme. South Africa has an important role to play. Not only must we advance our domestic innovation ecosystem, but we must also advocate globally on behalf of underserved regions still waiting to be seen, heard, and funded. The SU20 Digital Transformation Workstream outlines a concrete path forward. It proposes that we fund the Startup Fund at scale to enable meaningful participation in the digital economy. Emerging innovators must have access to early-stage, patient capital that prioritises inclusion and impact. It also proposes that we enforce platform compliance through regulatory agencies, ensuring dominant platforms are held accountable through effective, transparent, and independent oversight. Furthermore, the workstream recommends embedding public-private startup labs within digital transformation programmes. These labs can serve as co-creation spaces that bring together government, entrepreneurs, and civil society to solve real-world problems using local insight and scalable technology. Perhaps the most significant contribution of the SU20 agenda is the proposed Digital Competition Compact. This is a landmark framework that introduces new global standards for digital fairness. The Compact establishes that platforms must not be allowed to preference their products over third-party services. It affirms that fair and open API access must be guaranteed, ensuring interoperability and innovation. It further calls for digital procurement processes to be reformed so that startups and emerging market innovators are included as a matter of policy, not exception. This is not an anti-technology stance. It is a pro-market, pro-competition, and pro-equity proposition. When civic technologies or early-stage startups are denied platform access or squeezed out of procurement processes by legacy players, we are no longer operating in a free and fair digital marketplace. We are reinforcing monopolistic behaviour. South Africa has both the moral authority and institutional experience to lead this agenda. As a country that understands the long-term effects of systemic exclusion, we must ensure our voice is prominent in shaping global digital rules. We should be among the first to adopt and promote the Digital Competition Compact. We should build and scale our Startup Fund. And we should institutionalise startup labs as core elements of government-led digital reform. In doing so, we will not only empower our own entrepreneurs. We will inspire a shift in how the global economy values innovation from the Global South. Diplomatic engagement has laid important foundations. But as digital inequalities deepen and platform control tightens, we must now choose justice. Not as an abstract ideal, but as a measurable, enforceable, and globally aligned principle. The digital economy must serve everyone, not just the privileged few. If the next billion internet users are to thrive, they must be empowered as creators, not just consumers. The era of digital diplomacy has passed. This is the era of digital justice. Prof. Eldrid Jordaan is the Founder of GovChat and Suppple PLC, a Professor of Practice at the Johannesburg Business School, and a member of the SU20 Foundation and Alliance Task Force.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
This Appears to Be Why Sam Altman Actually Got Fired by OpenAI
It's been nearly 18 months since OpenAI Sam Altman was unceremoniously sacked by the firm before being summarily reinstated just a few days later — and a new book claims to have the tea behind the stunning coup. In an excerpt from her forthcoming book about Altman, Wall Street Journal reporter Keach Hagey revealed, based on dozens of interviews with insiders, that the November 2023 episode jokingly referred to as the "turkey-shoot clusterf*ck" was ultimately caused by power struggles, politicking, and an alleged pattern of untruths. The root of the debacle seems, per Hagey's excerpt, to have stemmed from a discovery in the summer of 2023, when an unidentified board member learned by chance that OpenAI's so-called "Startup Fund" was allegedly not disbursing funds to intended investors. After months of obfuscation, the board learned that Altman himself owned the fund — a finding, it seems, that began to unravel mounting doubts in the CEO's leadership. Not long after Altman's ownership of the fund came to light, OpenAI cofounder and ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever placed a rare call to fellow board member Helen Toner, a Georgetown AI safety researcher. Instead of being forthright with his thoughts, he suggested Toner talk to former chief technology officer Mira Murati — and those conversations apparently got the ball rolling in earnest. In a subsequent call, Murati regaled Toner with stories of the CEO's allegedly toxic managerial style. For weeks, the erstwhile CTO said, Altman insisted on bringing in a human resources representative during their one-on-one meetings until she promised not to share certain information with the board. Beyond the Startup Fund flap, the mercurial CEO was also accused, the book reports, of other major untruths. He once claimed, in a Slack screenshot Murati later shared with the board, that an OpenAI lawyer told him a specific ChatGPT product didn't need any safety review — but when she followed up, that attorney said he never made such an assertion. Altman also seemingly pushed ChatGPT out to the public in the first place without consulting the board ahead of time. Following that lore drop, Sutskever revealed his own, similar concerns to Toner. He'd been waiting for years, it seems, for the right moment to convince the board to fire his fellow cofounder amid professional tensions and differences in perspective — and the Startup Fund fiasco seemed to be the right time. After speaking in secret to the rest of the board — save for Altman and his right-hand man, OpenAI president Greg Brockman — the former chief scientist and Murati sent hefty PDF files full of related evidence to the sympathetic board members using, as the book notes, Gmail's self-destructing email function. During a furtive video call on November 16, four of the company's six board members — Sutskever, Toner, former tech founder Tasha McCauley, and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo — voted to fire Altman and remove Brockman from the board. According to the author's sources, the board members who'd voted on the ouster told Sutskever they were concerned he may have been acting as a loyalty-testing spy. Ironically, the board's opaque insistence that Altman had been fired because he was not "consistently candid" was true of the governing body that issued it. Neither Murati, who'd been asked to step in as CEO, nor the board informed staff or the press of the behind-the-scenes machinations — and eventually, Altman loyalists began to view the firing, somewhat rightfully, as a coup. The rest, as they say, is history — though the power play at the root of Altman's failed ouster shows an alarming degree of discord at a company that claims to be radically changing the world. More on Altman: Sam Altman Whines That When You Become a Billionaire, "Everyone Hates You For Everything"
