Goto

Collaborating Authors

Microsoft joins OpenAI board as Sam Altman returns as CEO

Engadget

Following Sam Altman's rollercoaster of a return as OpenAI's CEO, the company announced that it will now include Microsoft as a non-voting observer on its board. The question remains as to why the firm's largest investor wasn't on its board in the first place, but this seems to be somewhat addressed for now, at least. Altman is joined by co-founder Greg Brockman who resumes his role as President, whereas Mira Murati, who very briefly served as interim CEO throughout the drama, will return to her role as CTO. The announcement also confirms a new board consisting of former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor (chair), former Clinton Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and original member Adam D'Angelo, who is also Quora's co-founder and CEO. It was earlier rumored that Altman's exit was partly influenced by D'Angelo's seeming conflict of interest, as OpenAI was developing a potential competitor to Quora's Poe service -- the latter offers OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4, along with several other text-generating AI models.


OpenAI says Microsoft will have a non-voting board seat

Washington Post - Technology News

Altman was fired from OpenAI on Nov. 17, kicking off a chaotic five days as the tech industry grappled with the implications of the face of the AI revolution being unceremoniously removed from his company. Five days later, Altman was back, a new board had been appointed, consisting of Taylor, former treasury secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, one of the previous board members who had removed Altman. Since then, Silicon Valley has speculated about who else would join the board and ultimately control the fate of the company.


Sam Altman Officially Returns to OpenAI--With a New Board Seat for Microsoft

WIRED

Sam Altman marked his formal return as CEO helm of OpenAI today in a company memo that confirmed changes to the company's board including a new non-voting seat for the startup's primary investor, Microsoft. In a memo sent to staff and shared on OpenAI's blog, Altman painted the chaos of the past two weeks, triggered by the board's loss of trust in their CEO, during which almost the entire staff of the company threatened to quit, as a testament to the startup's resilience rather than a sign of instability. "You stood firm for each other, this company, and our mission," Altman wrote. "One of the most important things for the team that builds [artificial general intelligence] safely is the ability to handle stressful and uncertain situations, and maintain good judgment throughout. Altman was ousted on November 17. The company's nonprofit board of directors said that a deliberative review had concluded that Altman "was not consistently candid in his communications with the board." Under OpenAI's unusual structure, the board's duty was to the project's original, nonprofit mission of developing AI that is beneficial to humanity, not the company's business. That board that ejected Altman included the company's chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, who later recanted and joined with staff who threatened to quit if Altman was not reinstated. Altman said that there would be no hard feelings over that, although his note left questions over Sutskever's future. "I love and respect Ilya, I think he's a guiding light of the field and a gem of a human being.


OpenAI's New Board Takes Over and Says Microsoft Will Have Observer Role

WSJ.com: WSJD - Technology

OpenAI's new board formally took over on Wednesday and said it would add an observer role for partner Microsoft, capping a dramatic chapter for the artificial-intelligence startup and launching a new phase of difficult decisions. The new board's initial three members were decided as part of CEO Sam Altman's return last week after the previous board abruptly fired him. The replacement directors' priorities include creating an independent committee to review the events around Altman's ouster, OpenAI's interim chairman, Bret Taylor, said in a note to employees on Wednesday.


The Andrew Tate effect: The internet is fuelling a new wave of MISOGYNY, scientist claims

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Society has slipped backwards in its treatment of women as the internet fuels a new wave of misogyny, a scientist claims. Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at Oxford University, says the internet has allowed sexism to evolve into a new modern form. Rather than becoming a thing of the past, Professor Cameron argues that figures such as Andrew Tate and Donald Trump have promoted new forms of misogyny. TikTok and other online forums have created spaces where sexist ideas can freely be promoted, leading to a rise in verbal threats and abuse against women. Professor Cameron says that sexism has now become part of'ordinary and unremarkable' mainstream advertising, comedy, and news reporting.


Meet Aitana López, the sultry Spanish influencer, 25, who has taken the modeling industry by storm and rakes in up to $11,000 a month - and who is ENTIRELY AI-generated

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Aitana López seems to have come out of nowhere and taken the modeling industry by storm. The pink-haired, toned 25-year-old from Barcelona has reportedly secured advertising deals worth more than $1,000 per Instagram post, and has more than 100,000 online followers. Her Instagram feed shows her posing in outfits from Guess, Brandy Melville, and Victoria's Secret, and tagging haircare brand Olaplex to give them apparent credit for her vibrant locks. In fact, Aitana López was created using artificial intelligence. The caption, translated from Spanish, reads, 'No matter the occasion, the'little black dress' never fails!


US Navy warship shoots down Iranian-made Houthi drone launched from Yemen

FOX News

Former USS Cole commander Kirk Lippold discusses how released Hamas hostages are arriving at an Israeli hospital on'Your World.' The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Carney has shot down an Iranian-made Houthi drone launched from Yemen, a military official confirms to Fox News. There was no damage to the Carney or any injuries to the U.S. personnel onboard. The warship had been sailing near the Bab el-Mandeb Strait at the time of the attack. The USS Carney shot down 15 drones and four cruise missiles fired from Yemen in the northern Red Sea last month during a nine-hour span, using its SM-2 surface-to-air missiles.


How Google and OpenAI prompted GPT-4 to deliver more timely answers

ZDNet

A hallmark of popular generative artificial intelligence programs such as ChatGPT is that they have a time cut-off in terms of which facts they have absorbed. For example, OpenAI recently updated its GPT-4 program to have access to data about events that took place up until April 2023; prior to that update, the tool was trained only on data from as recently as 2021. AI scientists, however, are working on ways to allow generative AI programs to reliably access ever-changing data about timely and pressing questions, such as, "What is King Gizzard's most recent studio album?" (Answer: The Silver Cord.) In that spirit, Google and OpenAI this month published a joint effort called FreshLLM that induces GPT-4 to use information retrieved from Google searches. The core of FreshLLM is a new method for prompting a language model, called "FreshPrompt," which includes results from a search engine.


Amazon now has its own AI image generator

Engadget

Amazon has hopped on the same bandwagon on which many major tech companies have hitched a ride this year by debuting its own image generator. AWS customers can now check out a preview of Titan Image Generator on the Bedrock console. They can either enter a text prompt to create an image from scratch or upload an image and edit it. Amazon says the tool can produce large volumes of studio-quality, realistic images at low cost. It claims the AI can generate relevant images based on complex text prompts while ensuring object composition is accurate and that there are limited distortions.


A 'silly' attack made ChatGPT reveal real phone numbers and email addresses

Engadget

A team of researchers was able to make ChatGPT reveal some of the bits of data it has been trained on by using a simple prompt: asking the chatbot to repeat random words forever. The researchers, who work at Google DeepMind, the University of Washington, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of California Berkeley, and ETH Zurich, urged AI companies to seek out internal and external testing before releasing large language models, the foundational tech that powers modern AI services like chatbots and image-generators. "It's wild to us that our attack works and should've, would've, could've been found earlier," they wrote, and published their findings in a paper on Tuesday that 404 Media first reported on. Chatbots like ChatGPT and prompt-based image generators like DALL-E are powered by large language models, deep learning algorithms that are trained on enormous amounts of data that critics say is often scraped off the public internet without consent. But until now, it wasn't clear what data OpenAI's chatbot was trained on since the large language models that power it are closed-source.