Sam Altman, the chief executive and co-founder of OpenAI, was ousted for allegedly lying to the board of his company, according to an announcement issued Friday. The board "no longer has confidence in his ability to lead" and said new leadership is "necessary" as the company moves forward, OpenAI said in a statement posted on its website. He is likewise leaving the company's board. Altman's departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," the board's statement said. What Altman had allegedly hidden from his company's board was not clear. "I loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit.

Sam Altman, who as CEO of OpenAI gave the world ChatGPT and became one of the most influential people in technology, has departed the company after losing the confidence of its board. A company statement says that a review "concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities." Mira Murati, previously OpenAI's chief technology officer, was appointed interim CEO while OpenAI searches for a full-time replacement, the statement says. Altman did not respond to a request for comment. Greg Brockman, who cofounded OpenAI with Altman alongside leading names in AI and technology, including Elon Musk, will also step down from his role as chair of the company's board, the company statement says.

In Silicon Valley, Altman has long been known as a smart investor and supporter of smaller companies, but the rise of OpenAI had catapulted him into the league of tech titans such as Muck, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and even the late Apple CEO Steve Jobs. As recently as Thursday, Altman was acting the CEO part, speaking onstage at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in San Francisco. Last week, he presented a new road map for OpenAI to big applause from hundreds of developers at the company's first major conference.

In a surprise shakeup of its c-suite Friday, OpenAI's board of directors announced that CEO Sam Altman has been fired and will be leaving both the company and the board, effective immediately. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati has been named interim CEO. Altman's oustering reportedly follows an internal "deliberative review process" which found he had not been "consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities," the company announced. As such, "the board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI." OpenAI, which owns popular AI chatbot ChatGPT, thanked Altman' for his "many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI," but believes that "as the leader of the company's research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO." The board added it has "the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period."

Amazon is sacking employees in its Alexa division even as it prepares to upgrade Alexa to be as smart as modern AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT. The move will impact several hundred employees in the US, Canada, and India, according to an internal email sent on Friday. "As we continue to invent, we're shifting some of our efforts to better align with our business priorities, and what we know matters most to customers -- which includes maximizing our resources and efforts focused on generative AI," wrote Daniel Bausch, Amazon's vice president of Alexa and Fire TV in the email, first obtained by GeekWire. "These shifts are leading us to discontinue some initiatives, which is resulting in several hundred roles being eliminated." An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Engadget that the company was, indeed, laying off "several hundred" people in the division and said that Amazon was trying to find roles for those impacted wherever possible.

Discord is pulling the plug on its AI chatbot, Clyde, less than a year after it was first introduced. Clyde's support page has been updated with a note alerting users that the bot will be deactivated at the end of this month. The platform announced Clyde back in March, describing it as an experimental feature. It's powered by OpenAI technology. "By December 1, 2023, users will no longer be able to invoke Clyde in DMs, Group DMs or server chats," according to the note.

Are we alone in the universe? Scientists are training machine-learning models and designing instruments to hunt for life on other worlds. Is it possible to really understand someone else's mind? How we think, feel and experience the world is a mystery to everyone but us. But technology may be starting to help us understand the minds of others.

Their work, which they will present at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in May next year, shines a light on how easy it is to force generative AI models into disregarding their own guardrails and policies, known as "jailbreaking." It also demonstrates how difficult it is to prevent these models from generating such content, as it's included in the vast troves of data they've been trained on, says Zico Kolter, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He demonstrated a similar form of jailbreaking on ChatGPT earlier this year but was not involved in this research. "We have to take into account the potential risks in releasing software and tools that have known security flaws into larger software systems," he says. All major generative AI models have safety filters to prevent users from prompting them to produce pornographic, violent, or otherwise inappropriate images. The models won't generate images from prompts that contain sensitive terms like "naked," "murder," or "sexy."

OpenAI, whose generative AI products initially raised fears of widespread cheating on homework, is now exploring how it can get its popular ChatGPT chatbot into classrooms, according to a senior executive. OpenAI's chief operating officer, Brad Lightcap, said at a conference in San Francisco that the company will form a team to explore educational applications of a technology that has threatened to upend industries, stoked new legislation and become a popular learning tool. "Most teachers are trying to figure out ways to incorporate (ChatGPT) into the curriculum and into the way they teach," Lightcap said at the INSEAD Americas Conference last week. "We at OpenAI are trying to help them think through the problem and we probably next year will establish a team with the sole intent of doing that."

Generative AI has significantly reduced the entry barrier to the domain of AI owing to the ease of use and core capabilities of automation, translation, and intelligent actions in our day to day lives. Currently, Large language models (LLMs) that power such chatbots are being utilized primarily for their automation capabilities for software monitoring, report generation etc. and for specific personalized question answering capabilities, on a limited scope and scale. One major limitation of the currently evolving family of LLMs is 'hallucinations', wherein inaccurate responses are reported as factual. Hallucinations are primarily caused by biased training data, ambiguous prompts and inaccurate LLM parameters, and they majorly occur while combining mathematical facts with language-based context. Thus, monitoring and controlling for hallucinations becomes necessary when designing solutions that are meant for decision makers. In this work we present the three major stages in the journey of designing hallucination-minimized LLM-based solutions that are specialized for the decision makers of the financial domain, namely: prototyping, scaling and LLM evolution using human feedback. These three stages and the novel data to answer generation modules presented in this work are necessary to ensure that the Generative AI chatbots, autonomous reports and alerts are reliable and high-quality to aid key decision-making processes.