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Musk v. Altman week 2: OpenAI fires back, and Shivon Zilis reveals that Musk tried to poach Sam Altman

MIT Technology Review

Musk v. Altman week 2: OpenAI fires back, and Shivon Zilis reveals that Musk tried to poach Sam Altman OpenAI president Greg Brockman said Elon Musk wanted the company to create a for-profit entity--and endured a public peek into his diary. OpenAI president Greg Brockman, foreground, exits the U.S. District Court in Oakland, California. In the second week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk's motivations for bringing the suit were under scrutiny. Last week, Musk took the stand, alleging that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into donating $38 million to the company. He claimed that they'd promised to maintain it as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the benefit of humanity, only to later accept billions of dollars of investment from Microsoft and restructure the company to operate a for-profit subsidiary. This week, Brockman fired back with his side of the story, arguing that Musk had actually pushed for OpenAI to create a for-profit arm and fought a bitter battle to have "absolute control" over it.


Former OpenAI board member says Elon Musk offered her sperm donations

BBC News

A former OpenAI board member has explained how her unconventional personal relationship with Elon Musk evolved into having four of his children. Shivon Zilis testified in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California for hours on Wednesday as part of Musk's lawsuit trying to reverse OpenAI's change to a for-profit company. The focus of Zilis's appearance was her direct involvement in early talks with Musk around the company becoming a for-profit, but also how she worked for and became involved with Musk as she advised OpenAI. I still really wanted to be a mum and Elon made the offer around that time and I accepted, she said, explaining Musk in 2020 had offered to donate sperm. He was encouraging everyone around him at that time to have kids and he'd noticed I did not.


Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI's models

MIT Technology Review

Musk v. Altman week 1: Elon Musk says he was duped, warns AI could kill us all, and admits that xAI distills OpenAI's models Musk kept his cool, and OpenAI's lawyer bulldozed him with piercing questions about his motivations for suing the company. In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could destroy us all and sat through revelations that he had poached OpenAI employees for his own companies. He even confessed, to some audible gasps in the courtroom, that his own AI company, xAI, which makes the chatbot Grok, uses OpenAI's models to train its own. The federal courthouse in Oakland, California, was packed with armies of lawyers carrying boxes of exhibits, journalists typing away at their laptops, and a handful of concerned OpenAI employees. Outside, protesters lined the streets, carrying signs urging people to quit ChatGPT, boycott Tesla, or both.


Musk and Altman's bitter feud over OpenAI to be laid bare in court

The Guardian

The tech titans are slated to duke it out in court. The tech titans are slated to duke it out in court. Musk and Altman's bitter feud over OpenAI to be laid bare in court Tesla chief believes Altman broke company's founding agreement - and legal battle promises to be explosive T he bitter rivalry between two of the tech world's most powerful men arrives in court this week, as Elon Musk's lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI heads to trial in Oakland, California. The case is set to feature some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, and its outcome could affect the course of the AI boom. Musk's suit, filed in 2024, focuses on the formative years of OpenAI when he, Altman and others co-founded the artificial intelligence company as a nonprofit with a grand purpose.


Calibeating Prediction-Powered Inference

van der Laan, Lars, Van Der Laan, Mark

arXiv.org Machine Learning

We study semisupervised mean estimation with a small labeled sample, a large unlabeled sample, and a black-box prediction model whose output may be miscalibrated. A standard approach in this setting is augmented inverse-probability weighting (AIPW) [Robins et al., 1994], which protects against prediction-model misspecification but can be inefficient when the prediction score is poorly aligned with the outcome scale. We introduce Calibrated Prediction-Powered Inference, which post-hoc calibrates the prediction score on the labeled sample before using it for semisupervised estimation. This simple step requires no retraining and can improve the original score both as a predictor of the outcome and as a regression adjustment for semisupervised inference. We study both linear and isotonic calibration. For isotonic calibration, we establish first-order optimality guarantees: isotonic post-processing can improve predictive accuracy and estimator efficiency relative to the original score and simpler post-processing rules, while no further post-processing of the fitted isotonic score yields additional first-order gains. For linear calibration, we show first-order equivalence to PPI++. We also clarify the relationship among existing estimators, showing that the original PPI estimator is a special case of AIPW and can be inefficient when the prediction model is accurate, while PPI++ is AIPW with empirical efficiency maximization [Rubin et al., 2008]. In simulations and real-data experiments, our calibrated estimators often outperform PPI and are competitive with, or outperform, AIPW and PPI++. We provide an accompanying Python package, ppi_aipw, at https://larsvanderlaan.github.io/ppi-aipw/.


"First Take" host acts disgusted when she has to cover Vrabel-Russini drama

FOX News

A piece of the UFC White House event's setup is sitting in Pennsylvania Amish country Viral Ottawa Senators fan blamed for team's 0-2 playoff start banished to Taiwan Edward Cabrera's strikeout prop is the play as struggling Phillies face surging Cubs today Nuggets vs Timberwolves Game 3 pick hinges on Jaden McDaniels calling out Denver's entire defense Charles Barkley was disgusted by Magic's highly questionable pregame handshake ChatGPT predicted the first round of the NFL Draft and here's what it said Curt Cignetti was so focused this offseason, he turned down all external requests: 'I'm 95% football' Former MLB owner claims'despicable' San Francisco Giants are the reason the A's left Oakland California governor's race intensifies as six candidates face off Trump: US Navy to'shoot and kill' any boat placing mines in Hormuz Virginia court blocks Democrats' redistricting effort, Florida next Trump weighs in on Iran's internal power struggle and Strait of Hormuz control Hasan Piker justifies'social murder' of CEO Fox News celebrates'Bring Your Kids to Work Day' OutKick'First Take' host acts disgusted when she has to cover Vrabel-Russini drama Oh no, holier-than-thou First Take has to cover the biggest story in the NFL! Dan Dakich reacts to the bombshell new photos of Mike Vrabel and Dianna Russini in Arizona that officially debunk the girls trip narrative. Go ahead and take a seat for this, and then take a deep breath. ESPN's holier-than-thou debate show, 'First Take,' was forced to discuss the Mike Vrabel-Dianna Russini news this morning. I can't believe those saints would dive into this scandalous story.



Improving reproducibility by controlling random seed stability in machine learning based estimation via bagging

Williams, Nicholas, Schuler, Alejandro

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Predictions from machine learning algorithms can vary across random seeds, inducing instability in downstream debiased machine learning estimators. We formalize random seed stability via a concentration condition and prove that subbagging guarantees stability for any bounded-outcome regression algorithm. We introduce a new cross-fitting procedure, adaptive cross-bagging, which simultaneously eliminates seed dependence from both nuisance estimation and sample splitting in debiased machine learning. Numerical experiments confirm that the method achieves the targeted level of stability whereas alternatives do not. Our method incurs a small computational penalty relative to standard practice whereas alternative methods incur large penalties.


Conformal Risk Control under Non-Monotone Losses: Theory and Finite-Sample Guarantees

Aldirawi, Tareq, Li, Yun, Guo, Wenge

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Conformal risk control (CRC) provides distribution-free guarantees for controlling the expected loss at a user-specified level. Existing theory typically assumes that the loss decreases monotonically with a tuning parameter that governs the size of the prediction set. However, this assumption is often violated in practice, where losses may behave non-monotonically due to competing objectives such as coverage and efficiency. In this paper, we study CRC under non-monotone loss functions when the tuning parameter is selected from a finite grid, a setting commonly arising in thresholding and discretized decision rules. Revisiting a known counterexample, we show that the validity of CRC without monotonicity depends critically on the relationship between the calibration sample size and the grid resolution. In particular, reliable risk control can still be achieved when the calibration sample is sufficiently large relative to the grid size. We establish a finite-sample guarantee for bounded losses over a grid of size $m$, showing that the excess risk above the target level $α$ scales on the order of $\sqrt{\log(m)/n}$, where $n$ is the calibration sample size. A matching lower bound demonstrates that this rate is minimax optimal. We also derive refined guarantees under additional structural conditions, including Lipschitz continuity and monotonicity, and extend the analysis to settings with distribution shift via importance weighting. Numerical experiments on synthetic multilabel classification and real object detection data illustrate the practical implications of non-monotonicity. Methods that explicitly account for finite-sample uncertainty achieve more stable risk control than approaches based on monotonicity transformations, while maintaining competitive prediction set sizes.


Enhancing AI and Dynamical Subseasonal Forecasts with Probabilistic Bias Correction

Guan, Hannah, Mouatadid, Soukayna, Orenstein, Paulo, Cohen, Judah, Dong, Haiyu, Ni, Zekun, Berman, Jeremy, Flaspohler, Genevieve, Lu, Alex, Schloer, Jakob, Talib, Joshua, Weyn, Jonathan A., Mackey, Lester

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Decision-makers rely on weather forecasts to plant crops, manage wildfires, allocate water and energy, and prepare for weather extremes. Today, such forecasts enjoy unprecedented accuracy out to two weeks thanks to steady advances in physics-based dynamical models and data-driven artificial intelligence (AI) models. However, model skill drops precipitously at subseasonal timescales (2 - 6 weeks ahead), due to compounding errors and persistent biases. To counter this degradation, we introduce probabilistic bias correction (PBC), a machine learning framework that substantially reduces systematic error by learning to correct historical probabilistic forecasts. When applied to the leading dynamical and AI models from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), PBC doubles the subseasonal skill of the AI Forecasting System and improves the skill of the operationally-debiased dynamical model for 91% of pressure, 92% of temperature, and 98% of precipitation targets. We designed PBC for operational deployment, and, in ECMWF's 2025 real-time forecasting competition, its global forecasts placed first for all weather variables and lead times, outperforming the dynamical models from six operational forecasting centers, an international dynamical multi-model ensemble, ECMWF's AI Forecasting System, and the forecasting systems of 34 teams worldwide. These probabilistic skill gains translate into more accurate prediction of extreme events and have the potential to improve agricultural planning, energy management, and disaster preparedness in vulnerable communities.