Context Analytics tracks 300+ private companies on Twitter using proprietary Natural Language Processing (NLP) and topic modeling capabilities. This allows for an aggregated view of how a company is being viewed by the public.
Beginning Friday afternoon, alerts triggered on Tweet Volume for OpenAI. These alerts showed an abnormally high volume for the topic. This was in response to the Tweet below, which is a statement by the OpenAI board, which explains CEO Sam Altman has departed the company.
This took the tech world by surprise and many people went to social media with their thoughts. OpenAI typically has 1000 – 2000 tweets per day. Within 2 hours of this post, there were 10000+ Tweets on OpenAI. The topic reached 50,0000+ Tweets within 24 hours.
Most of this Twitter volume was graded negatively by Context Analytics’ NLP. Below is a graph of OpenAI’s 30-day average sentiment. This gives an idea of how the public views the company over the past month. There has been a sharp decrease in sentiment since the post Friday afternoon. This shows the public is bearish on this move by OpenAI’s board.
Below are the top hashtags within 2 hours of the announcement. The top handful are clear. #OpenAI, #AI, and #ChatGPT are all topics about the company, and #SamAltman is the CEO who left the company.
OpenAI is facing criticism on social media for how the situation unfolded. Their sentiment has decreased significantly since the announcement. Large investors in the company do not seem pleased with the board for their actions. One investor, Microsoft, has already hired Sam Altman as of this morning. Microsoft is seeing high Tweet volume today compared to their historical average due to this event. Additionally, Microsoft’s sentiment score is extremely positive today and the stock is up over 1.5% since the market opened today.
Many lead people at OpenAI have left due to Altman being ousted. President Greg Brockman and 3 lead senior researchers have left the company and plan to follow Altman. This situation is still unfolding, and we’ll see how OpenAI proceeds without its core leadership from the last few years.