With OpenAI’s future in limbo, its startup customers are looking to jump ship to other AI models offered by rivals Anthropic and Meta

• Many of OpenAI’s customers are startup founders that build on top of the company’s models.
• But this weekend’s turmoil has many businesses looking for new AI model providers.
• Some investors are starting to advise their companies to diversify the models they use.

With Sam Altman’s potential return to OpenAI still up in the air, one group is also left in the dark: OpenAI’s startup customers.

For the millions of developers and startup founders who use OpenAI’s models and cloud provider for their own products or businesses, the board’s decision to fire Altman as CEO on Friday prompted many to look for alternative business partners in order to avoid service disruptions. Those fears were heightened on Monday, when over 700 OpenAI employees threatened to resign if he was not reinstated.

Several startup founders told Business Insider that they were thinking about moving to an open source model, such as Meta’s Llama 2 or Anthropic’s Claude. Some said they were considering switching from Microsoft Azure to Google or Amazon Web Services.

“We will most likely offer Llama 2 as a future option for users to choose from and look into fine tuning our own models if the OpenAI situation worsens,” said James Blackwell, founder of the AI-generated quiz maker QuizGecko, whose company currently uses OpenAI’s model.

Nonetheless, several customers, including Takeoff AI founder McKay Wrigley, are migrating to Microsoft’s Azure service, which sells copies of OpenAI models and other models. He added that after Microsoft announced the hiring of Sam Altman and former OpenAI president Greg Brockman to lead the company’s advanced AI research team, this option seemed even more appealing. According to The Information, Morgan Stanley, one of OpenAI’s flagship customers, had stated prior to the shakeup that it was shifting more of their AI software to rely on Microsoft’s Azure cloud.

Wrigley told Business Insider that he would continue to use OpenAI’s API for the time being, but that he had spent the weekend migrating all of his startup’s cloud services to the Azure OpenAI Service.

“I have full confidence in the team that is there,” Wrigley said of the OpenAI team. “My concern is that the team may soon be absent.” If things don’t get resolved, they’ll all jump ship to the new Microsoft outfit, and who knows what will still be online at that point?

Other founders are now considering Anthropic’s Claude as a viable alternative.

“We chose OpenAI because of its perceived stability,” said Charlie Dolan, founder of DSQ Solutions, a tech-enabled waste management startup. Given the “turmoil” of the last 72 hours, he said he’s thinking about Azure, but he could just as easily move parts of his code that rely on OpenAI to Anthropic.

Over the weekend, more than 100 OpenAI customers contacted Anthropic, according to The Information.

However, founders stated that the crisis has caused them to reconsider their reliance on a single vertically-integrated model and have considered diversifying across models or even developing their own.

“There’s definitely a lot of anxiety in the developer ecosystem right now,” said Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, a startup that assists developers in building websites that integrate with many of the most powerful AI models.

Madrona’s managing director, Matt McIlwain, told Business Insider that several AI founders in his portfolio contacted him over the weekend seeking advice on how to avoid a crisis if OpenAI sees a mass exodus of engineers.

One trend he’s noticed and advises some founders on is using different models for different needs, such as “doing some training across OpenAI and then using Llama for another component or stable diffusion for another component,” he said.

He compared the problem to startups looking for new banking providers following the Silicon Valley Bank crisis. “We’ve had two big situations here in 2023 where you don’t want to be single-threaded — in one case it was our banking partners, and in one case it’s our model partners,” he said.Alistair Barr assisted with this report.