If you're looking to understand the philosophy that underpins Silicon Valley's latest gold rush, look no further than OpenAI's Scarlett Johansson debacle. The story, according to Johansson's lawyers, goes like this: Nine months ago, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman approached the actor with a request to license her voice for a new digital assistant; Johansson declined. She alleges that just two days before the company's keynote event last week, in which that assistant was revealed as part of a new system called GPT-4o, Altman reached out to Johansson's team, urging the actor to reconsider. Johansson and Altman allegedly never spoke, and Johansson allegedly never granted OpenAI permission to use her voice. Nevertheless, the company debuted Sky two days later--a program with a voice many believed was alarmingly similar to Johansson's.

In 2023, Microsoft was a big believer in large language models, running in the cloud. At Microsoft Build, the company launched Phi Silica, a small language model designed to run specifically on the NPUs in new Copilot PCs. In April, Microsoft announced Phi-3-mini, a model small enough to run on a local PC. Phi Silica is a derivative of Phi-3-mini, designed specifically to run on the Copilot PCs that Microsoft announced Monday. Most interactions with AI take place in the cloud; Microsoft's existing Copilot service, even on your PC, talks to a Microsoft remote server.

Yet this month, it antagonized someone much more powerful, and is already retreating just a touch. On Monday evening, Scarlett Johansson issued a statement to NPR's Bobby Allyn about OpenAI's GPT-4o announcement, which the company showcased in a live demonstration just last week. Specifically, the multimodal computer interaction model centered around a voice assistant named Sky, whose timbre really, really resembled ScarJo's. "Last September, I received an offer from Sam Altman, who wanted to hire me to voice the current ChatGPT 4.0 system," Johansson wrote. "After much consideration and for personal reasons, I declined the offer. Nine months later, my friends, family and the general public all noted how much the newest system named'Sky' sounded like me. When I heard the released demo, I was shocked, angered and in disbelief that Mr. Altman would pursue a voice that sounded so eerily similar to mine that my closest friends and news outlets could not tell the difference."

Scarlett Johannson has gone to war with OpenAI, and in the battle for public opinion, OpenAI is losing--badly. Last week, OpenAI released an update of its AI chatbot called ChatGPT-4o, which featured a female voice talking to its users. Many people pointed out that the voice, which sometimes seemed to veer into flirtation, was eerily similar to Scarlett Johannson's in the 2013 dystopian sci-fi film Her. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has long talked about how much the movie inspired the company's products, and even made the connection clear last week by tweeting the title of the movie. But on Monday, Johannson released a statement saying OpenAI had asked her to be the voice of the chatbot, and when she refused, they found a soundalike.

The company said so again last week when it unveiled a chattier ChatGPT that featured the Johansson sound-alike. The same day, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X a one-word reference to the 2013 movie "Her," in which Johansson was the voice of an emotional companion AI.

For the past decade, AI researcher Chris Olah has been obsessed with artificial neural networks. One question in particular engaged him, and has been the center of his work, first at Google Brain, then OpenAI, and today at AI startup Anthropic, where he is a cofounder. "What's going on inside of them?" he says. "We have these systems, we don't know what's going on. That question has become a core concern now that generative AI has become ubiquitous. Large language models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropic's own Claude have dazzled people with their language prowess and infuriated people with their tendency to make things up. Their potential to solve previously intractable problems enchants techno-optimists. But LLMs are strangers in our midst. Even the people who build them don't know exactly how they work, and massive effort is required to create guardrails to prevent them from churning out bias, misinformation, and even blueprints for deadly chemical weapons. If the people building the models knew what happened inside these "black boxes,'' it would be easier to make them safer.

The annual Microsoft Build developers officially conference kicks off today -- but the tech giant has already revealed a laundry list of AI-centric hardware news. In a jam-packed Monday press conference, Microsoft unveiled one of the biggest changes to the Windows PC landscape in a long time. Copilot PCs, led by new Surface Laptop and Surface Pro models, are a promising new line of computers powered by Qualcomm Arm chips that enable significantly improved battery life without (if Microsoft is to be believed) the performance and compatibility compromises that have afflicted earlier Windows-on-Arm iterations over the past dozen or so years. So what else does Microsoft have up its sleeve this week? With the hardware and Windows 11 news already on the board, CEO Satya Nadella and crew can provide even more detail on how the company's OpenAI partnership will further develop, and how Redmond will continue to counter Google's Gemini upgrades which were announced just last week.

I'm in Seoul for the International AI summit, the half-year follow-up to last year's Bletchley Park AI safety summit (the full sequel will be in Paris this autumn). While you read this, the first day of events will have just wrapped up – though, in keeping with the reduced fuss this time round, that was merely a "virtual" leaders' meeting. When the date was set for this summit – alarmingly late in the day for, say, a journalist with two preschool children for whom four days away from home is a juggling act – it was clear that there would be a lot to cover. The inaugural AI safety summit at Bletchley Park in the UK last year announced an international testing framework for AI models, after calls … for a six-month pause in development of powerful systems. There has been no pause. The Bletchley declaration, signed by UK, US, EU, China and others, hailed the "enormous global opportunities" from AI but also warned of its potential for causing "catastrophic" harm.

Ever since Scarlett Johansson voiced an AI assistant in the sci-fi blockbuster'Her', many tech fans have dreamed of making that technology a reality. But it now seems that OpenAI may have pursued that dream too literally as they face accusations of deliberately copying Johansson's voice for ChatGPT's latest update. According to Ms Johansson's statement, the likeness is'so eerily similar to mine that close friends and news outlets could not tell the difference'. Following the allegations, OpenAI's'flirty' voice assistant has now been paused, yet tech fans have been weighing in on whether there really is a resemblance. So, do you think ChatGPT's AI voice sounds like Scarlett Johansson?

'The CyberGuy' Kurt Knutsson joins'Fox & Friends Weekend' to discuss Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and its CEO over a contractual breach, saying hes right on this one. "Avengers" and "Her" actress Scarlett Johansson revealed that legal action was likely behind OpenAI removing a voice that sounded eerily like hers. A statement released by NPR on Monday explained that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reached out to Johansson in September about possibly hiring her to voice the ChatGPT 4.0 system. She claimed he suggested her "comforting" voice "could bridge the gap between tech companies and creatives" and help with the "seismic shift concerning humans and Al." Though she rejected the offer after "much consideration and for personal reasons," Johansson was furious to hear the public discuss how the "Sky" voice system resembled hers. Scarlett Johansson said in a statement that she took legal action against OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and the company.