Goto

Collaborating Authors

 board member


Ben & Jerry's row deepens as three board members removed

BBC News

Ben & Jerry's row deepens as three board members removed Three members of Ben & Jerry's independent board will no longer be eligible to serve in their roles, after the ice cream company introduced a new set of governance practices. These include a nine-year limit set on board members' terms. Chair Anuradha Mittal, who earlier said she had no plans to resign under pressure, is among those affected. The move was criticised by the company's co-founder Ben Cohen, who called it a blatant power grab designed to strip the board of legal authority and independence. His remarks are the latest in a long-running row between Ben and Jerry's and its owner over the Cherry Garcia maker's social activism and the continued independence of its board.


'We're Definitely Going to Build a Bunker Before We Release AGI'

The Atlantic - Technology

In the summer of 2023, Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and the chief scientist of OpenAI, was meeting with a group of new researchers at the company. By all traditional metrics, Sutskever should have felt invincible: He was the brain behind the large language models that helped build ChatGPT, then the fastest-growing app in history; his company's valuation had skyrocketed; and OpenAI was the unrivaled leader of the industry believed to power the future of Silicon Valley. But the chief scientist seemed to be at war with himself. Sutskever had long believed that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, was inevitable--now, as things accelerated in the generative-AI industry, he believed AGI's arrival was imminent, according to Geoff Hinton, an AI pioneer who was his Ph.D. adviser and mentor, and another person familiar with Sutskever's thinking. To people around him, Sutskever seemed consumed by thoughts of this impending civilizational transformation. What would the world look like when a supreme AGI emerged and surpassed humanity? And what responsibility did OpenAI have to ensure an end state of extraordinary prosperity, not extraordinary suffering?


OpenAI's new for-profit plan leaves many unanswered questions

Engadget

OpenAI has abandoned its controversial restructuring plan. In a dramatic reversal, the company said Monday it would no longer try to separate control of its for-profit arm from the non-profit board that currently oversees operations. "We made the decision for the nonprofit to retain control of OpenAI after hearing from civic leaders and engaging in constructive dialogue with the offices of the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California," said Bret Taylor, the chairman of OpenAI. OpenAI had originally argued its existing structure would not allow its nonprofit to "easily do more than control the for-profit." It also said it needed more money, a mere two months after securing 6.6 billion in new investment.


Meet the AI, crypto executive cozying up to Trump while also backing resistance movement: 'Won't be fooled'

FOX News

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent responds to economic uncertainty, breaking down President Donald Trump's fiscal and cryptocurrency goals on'My View with Lara Trump.' FIRST ON FOX: One of the major players in the crypto and artificial intelligence (AI) industries attempting to cozy up to the Trump administration is a longtime Democratic operative and donor who has backed anti-Trump efforts and candidates while working for companies stacked with Democratic activists. Chris Lehane, a veteran political strategist dating back to the Clinton administration, has donated over 150,000 to Democrats, FEC records show, and many of those Democrats have been outspoken Trump critics for several years. Lehane has been a major backer of Democratic Sen. Mark Warner, who voted to convict Trump during his impeachment trial in 2021 and against several of Trump's Cabinet nominees. He also hosted a San Francisco fundraiser for the Virginia senator, along with Open AI's Sam Altman, in March. Warner has been a key figure in the resistance to the Trump administration, including being a vocal critic of the Trump administration's "sloppy" Signal chat controversy and pushing back on the administration's DOGE push against waste, fraud and abuse in government.


Does AI need all that money? (Tech giants say yes)

The Guardian

It's been another wild few days in Elon Musk news. Stay tuned for our coverage. In personal news, I deleted Instagram from my phone to try out a month without it there. Instead of scrolling, I've been listening to Shygirl and Lady Gaga's new music. DeepSeek roiled the US stock market last week by proposing that AI shouldn't really be all that expensive. The suggestion was so stunning it wiped about 600bn off of Nvidia's market cap in one day.


'Progressive except for Palestine': how a tech charity imploded over a statement on Gaza

The Guardian

Miliaku Nwabueze, a senior program manager at Code for Science & Society, had been concerned for some time about the role of technology in state violence. Then, on 7 October of last year, Hamas entered Israel, killing and kidnapping about 1,400 people. Less than a week later, as Israel ordered 1.1 million Palestinians out of northern Gaza in the onset of its deadly retaliation, Nwabueze decided to write a message to her colleagues on the US-based non-profit organization's Slack channel. "Hey y'all … I have been watching multiple genocides around the world," she began, naming Palestine as well as Sudan, the Congo and Artsakh. "All of these have heavy linkages to the tech industry." The 30-year-old went on to assert that CS&S – whose stated mission is to "advance the power of data to improve the social and economic lives of all people" – should say, at the minimum, "we support demands for a ceasefire" in Gaza.


Role-RL: Online Long-Context Processing with Role Reinforcement Learning for Distinct LLMs in Their Optimal Roles

He, Lewei, Shi, Tianyu, Huang, Pengran, Chen, Bingzhi, Chen, Qianglong, Pan, Jiahui

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) with long-context processing are still challenging because of their implementation complexity, training efficiency and data sparsity. To address this issue, a new paradigm named Online Long-context Processing (OLP) is proposed when we process a document of unlimited length, which typically occurs in the information reception and organization of diverse streaming media such as automated news reporting, live e-commerce, and viral short videos. Moreover, a dilemma was often encountered when we tried to select the most suitable LLM from a large number of LLMs amidst explosive growth aiming for outstanding performance, affordable prices, and short response delays. In view of this, we also develop Role Reinforcement Learning (Role-RL) to automatically deploy different LLMs in their respective roles within the OLP pipeline according to their actual performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on our OLP-MINI dataset and it is found that OLP with Role-RL framework achieves OLP benchmark with an average recall rate of 93.2% and the LLM cost saved by 79.4%. The code and dataset are publicly available at: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Role-RL.


OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Is Leaving the Company

WIRED

OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati resigned on Wednesday, saying she wants "the time and space to do my own exploration." Murati had been among the three executives at the very top of the company behind ChatGPT, and she was briefly its leader last year while board members wrestled with the fate of CEO Sam Altman. "There's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right," she wrote in a message to OpenAI staff that she posted on X. Altman replied to Murati's X post writing that "it's hard to overstate how much Mira has meant to OpenAI, our mission, and to us all personally." He added that he feels "personal gratitude towards her for the support and love during all the hard times." A successor wasn't immediately announced.


Xavier Niel, a Driving Force of French AI, Is Now Shaping TikTok

WIRED

All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. I wait to meet Xavier Niel in a room that feels fitting for one of France's richest men. Niel is the original French internet mogul, of the generation before founders wore T-shirts to the office. His team wears suits; he arrives in a classic white shirt.


Why Sam Altman Is Leaving OpenAI's Safety Committee

TIME - Tech

OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman is stepping down from the internal committee that the company created to advise its board on "critical safety and security" decisions amid the race to develop ever more powerful artificial intelligence technology. The committee, formed in May, had been evaluating OpenAI's processes and safeguards over a 90-day period. OpenAI published the committee's recommendations following the assessment on Sept. 16. As such, Altman, who, in addition to serving OpenAI's board, oversees the company's business operations in his role as CEO, will no longer serve on the safety committee. In line with the committee's recommendations, OpenAI says the newly independent committee will be chaired by Zico Kolter, Director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, who joined OpenAI's board in August.