Course Overview:
OpenAI didn’t begin as just another Silicon Valley startup. It began as a warning.
Founded by tech heavyweights including Elon Musk, Larry Page, and Sam Altman, OpenAI was created out of a shared fear:
What if artificial intelligence becomes too powerful — and ends up in the wrong hands?
From that fear emerged OpenAI — the organization that would later create ChatGPT, the AI system now being used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, including professionals, firms, and regulators.
What followed was a wild and very public ethical experiment: a mission-driven nonprofit, an unprecedented governance structure, and a global race toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). That experiment eventually fractured — culminating in one of the most dramatic leadership crises in modern corporate history, when OpenAI’s CEO was abruptly fired and just as abruptly reinstated.
Beneath the headlines lies a deeper story about values, judgment, and control.
This course explores the ideological divide at the heart of AI development:
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Symbolic AI — systems built on explicit rules, logic, and human control
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Connectionism — neural networks that learn from data and evolve in ways even their creators can’t always fully explain
These aren’t just technical choices. They reflect fundamentally different beliefs about risk, responsibility, transparency, and human oversight — beliefs that shaped OpenAI’s decisions and exposed deep fault lines in leadership and governance.
What You Will Learn:
By the end of this session, you will be able to:
- Describe the founding of OpenAI and its role as the creator of ChatGPT, including the leadership and governance events surrounding the removal and reinstatement of Sam Altman.
- Differentiate symbolic AI and connectionist AI approaches and explain how each raises distinct ethical and governance risks.
- Analyze the OpenAI case to identify ethical tensions related to leadership, transparency, accountability, and professional judgment.
- Evaluate how the pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) challenges existing professional ethics frameworks and standards.
- Apply core professional ethics principles to emerging AI-driven scenarios relevant to CPAs and finance professionals.
Who Should Attend:
CPAs in public practice or industry, executives, board members, audit committee professionals, and anyone interested in the intersection of ethics, leadership, and disruptive technology.
Course length:
2.0hrs