Some investors in OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, are exploring legal recourse against the company's board, sources familiar with the matter have told the Reuters news agency, after the directors removed CEO Sam Altman and sparked a potential mass exodus of employees. Sources said investors are working with legal advisers to study their options. It was not immediately clear if these investors will sue OpenAI. Investors worry they could lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector. OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Multibillion-dollar investments in artificial intelligence startups have become almost commonplace in Silicon Valley -- with dollars raised for AI companies outpacing funding totals in every other category of tech, and reaching $17.9 billion in the third quarter. According to PitchBook data, the value of funding for AI companies climbed 27% globally in the third quarter compared to the year before. That's even as overall deals for startups fell 31% from a year earlier to hit $73 billion worldwide. The opposing trend lines highlight a divide between AI startups and the rest of the industry. Rising interest rates and a post-pandemic slump have hammered venture capitalist funding, making AI one of the venture capital world's lone bright spots.

California would become the first state to require venture capital firms to disclose the race and gender of the founders of the companies they fund, under a bill currently awaiting governor Gavin Newsom's signature. The business community strongly opposes the legislation, characterizing it as an example of bureaucratic overreach. But civil rights groups and female entrepreneurs say it could go a long way toward equalizing opportunity in Silicon Valley, where startup capital overwhelmingly flows to white men. According to the business data firm PitchBook, companies founded by all-female teams accounted for just 2% of venture capital funding last year. Those led by Black women and Latinas received even less, 0.85%, according to a report from Project Diane, a research effort focused on female founders.

President Joe Biden's recent visit to India and Vietnam marked one of the administration's recent signals for economic and technological "de-risking" with China. The trip followed Biden's executive order, issued in August, that vowed to block U.S. venture capital and private equity investment in Chinese firms working on sensitive technologies such as semiconductors, artificial intelligence, and quantum computing. An era of global venture capital appears to be coming to a close. As Washington attempts to limit cross-border capital flows, however, America might be at risk of forfeiting its own access to Chinese technology and long-standing commitment to global investment. While the executive order is intended to be narrow and targeted at military acquisitions of key technology, it epitomizes a broader trend of increasing scrutiny on high-tech venture investment relationships between the U.S. and China. In a high-profile rebranding, Sequoia Capital recently spun off its highly successful China arm in June.

Within the next five years, the way we work, live, play, and learn will be changed by digital humans (chatbots and avatars with very realistic human faces). Digital humans are already gaining popularity as social media influencers, and they will soon evolve into digital sales assistants, fashion advisers, and personal shoppers able to model how customers will look and move in the latest ensembles. Digital humans will become central to the multibillion-dollar fashion industry, as social media is further integrated into the retail customer experience. Digital humans will also help in healthcare, enabling medical students and social workers to develop better interview skills for patients in sensitive clinical settings. They will allow people, especially those with mental health challenges, to rehearse for job interviews. They will help keep elderly people connected to their communities and respectfully monitored so they can remain in their homes longer. They will provide a human face for personalized advice, support, and training--and do it at scale. This has become possible with the advent of cost-effective, highly realistic, personalized interactive digital agents and avatars sporting high-fidelity facial simulations powered by advances in both real-time neural rendering (NR) and low-latency computing. NR refers to the use of machine-learning (ML) techniques to generate digital faces or face replacements in video.17 NR rose to prominence with the advent of so-called "deep fakes"--the replacement of someone's face in videos with an NR-generated face of remarkable realism. The term originates from the name of a Reddit user (/u/deepfakes), a ML engineer who posted the original deep fake auto-encoder. Often used for satire, deep fakes can be harmful, presenting novel ethical issues. The best-known examples involve deep fakes of celebrities, a form of face "hijacking" whereby publicly available videos of a person are used to train an ML program that overlays the source person's face onto existing video footage; this technique was originally used in pornographic material.

Reid Hoffman, one of Silicon Valley's most prominent investors, is scaling back his involvement in new deals at leading venture firm Greylock Partners as he spends more time pursuing artificial-intelligence efforts.

Justine Bateman told Fox News Digital using artificial intelligence to write a script is not solving any problems because there is no lack of talent in the industry. With big bank accounts, celebrities have begun to invest money in companies using artificial intelligence, predominately startups. Within the past few years, "The Wolf of Wall Street" actor Leonardo DiCaprio and "Iron Man" himself, Robert Downey Jr., have both reportedly invested millions, along with their respective venture capital firms, into AI companies designed to impact the environment. Other stars, including Ashton Kutcher and Black Eyed Peas singer and rapper will.i.am., are also exploring the world of AI, something Kutcher believes is deeply intertwined into a successful future. Ashton Kutcher believes AI is the future and a good thing for humanity.

You've seen it on TV, you've read about it on news websites. Artificial Intelligence, commonly referred to as AI, is now the hottest industry. Stocks that are involved in this industry are taking off. I originally wrote about a form of artificial intelligence back in October of 2021 in an article called The Future of Artificial Intelligence: Can You Invest In It Now? So you may be wondering what companies are the purest plays.

Infogrid, a leader in sustainability focused smart building technology,announced it has raised $90 million in fresh equity and converting CLNs, and a further $30m of debt facilities in Series B funding after 5x growth in 2022. Funding came from Original Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Northzone, TVC, JLL Spark, Committed Capital, Pictet, and several others. Infogrid is an AI-powered sustainability focused smart building platform that automates and optimizes facilities and building management, actively preventing carbon emissions, water and chemical waste while making buildings safe. It does this while generating significant financial ROIs for its facility manager and landlord clients. Infogrid provides building owners, facility and workplace managers with a holistic and real-time view of building data that can help them meet sustainability targets, reduce costs and improve employee productivity and well-being.

Would you like to be shown around your dream house designed entirely by the latest generative Artificial Intelligence technology? Buying and selling homes was one of the first industries to be disrupted by the emergence of the internet. Now the next wave - of Artificial Intelligence - looks set to transform the way we plan, design, construct and monitor all new and existing homes, office buildings and industrial warehouses etc. While the image of a robot estate agent powered by ChatGPT may spring to mind, this is not where the most important applications of AI are today. The game changing opportunity for AI in the built world lies in its potential to enable us to design, build and operate better, greener and cheaper buildings using tools such as robotics, the Internet of Things, computer vision, machine learning, natural language processing and generative AI.