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- OpenAI rivals say Sam Altman's ousting and reinstatement as CEO has created opportunities.
- Hugging Face and Cohere say they've had more customer inquiries following the chaos.
- Josh Gartner of Cohere told CNBC that clients want "reliable business solutions, not soap operas."
OpenAI's rivals say the chaos of ousting Sam Altman as CEO only for him to return days later has helped them attract more interest from potential customers.
Although Altman is back, the company behind ChatGPT no longer seems invincible.
Hugging Face, a machine-learning start-up with investors including Nvidia, Salesforce, and Amazon, says it's had a surge of enquiries following OpenAI's boardroom coup.
"I think a lot of companies, organizations now are kind of wondering about the risk about outsourcing their AI to just one AI provider," Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC.
"It creates, obviously a single point of failure for them — a little bit for the field too — so they're investigating different solutions."
Cohere, a Toronto-based AI startup backed by the likes of Oracle and Nvidia, also says the OpenAI commotion has driven up interest from new customers.
Josh Gartner, spokesperson for Cohere, puts this down to people wanting "reliable business solutions, not soap operas," he told CNBC.
After the OpenAI chaos began, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez and COO Martin Kon sent a note to investors assuring them that, unlike one of their competitors, its leadership team was unified.
"We believe enterprises feel more than ever that they need a stable and reliable LLM provider," they wrote.
More than 100 OpenAI customers contacted Google's Anthropic as the drama unfolded, while investors and founders reported a newfound confidence in their prospects.
"The European founders I know are more confident in themselves after seeing what seems like a complete mess up from OpenAI, so they're more willing to think at a bigger scale which then means more serious competition," one European founder told Business Insider.
Both Hugging Face and Cohere have the backing of big-name investors and were valued at $4.5 billion and $2 billion, respectively, in August. That's still a fraction of OpenAI's $86 billion, per The Information.
While questions remain about the future of regulation and the non-profit structure at OpenAI, Altman's company still dominates the generative AI sphere with ChatGPT.