I first learned about The Clause from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. During an interview with him in May 2023, I asked about the deal between Microsoft and OpenAI that granted his company exclusive access to the startup's groundbreaking AI technology. I knew the contract had set a cap on how much profit Microsoft could make from the arrangement, and I asked him what would happen if and when that point was reached. The answer was a bit puzzling. "Fundamentally, their long-term idea is we get to superintelligence," he told me.

Microsoft and OpenAI are planning to announce Tuesday that they are helping to launch an AI training center for members of the second-largest teachers' union in the US, according to details about the initiative that appear to have been inadvertently published early on YouTube. The National Academy for AI Instruction will be based in New York City and aims to equip kindergarten up to 12th grade instructors in the American Federation of Teachers with "the tools and confidence to bring AI into the classroom in a way that supports learning and opportunity for all students," according to the description of a publicly accessible YouTube livestream scheduled for Tuesday morning. The YouTube page also lists Anthropic, which develops the Claude chatbot, as a collaborator on what's described as a 22.5 million initiative to bring free "AI training and curriculum" to teachers. The three AI companies and the union did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the information released on YouTube. On Monday, Microsoft and the union declined to share details ahead of an announcement planned for Tuesday morning in New York.

If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, please contact the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988 or 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Balaji's death on November 26 was ruled a suicide, and Fox News Digital previously reported that the San Francisco Police Department found no evidence of foul play. But the 26-year-old's mother is urging police to reopen their investigation, saying it "doesn't look like a normal situation." Bereaved mother Poornima Ramarao told Business Insider that a private autopsy commissioned by Balaji's family and completed in early December produced concerning results. Now, they are working with an attorney to urge the department to conduct a "proper investigation."

A group of publications that include the Chicago Tribune, New York Daily News and the Orlando Sentinel are suing Microsoft and OpenAI, as reported by The Verge. Their products can regurgitate Times' articles verbatim and can "mimic its expressive style," the publication said, even though they didn't have a prior licensing agreement. In a motion seeking to dismiss key parts of the lawsuit, Microsoft accused the Times of doomsday futurology by claiming that generative AI can pose a threat to independent journalism. ACG's newspapers complain of the same thing, that the companies' chatbots are reproducing their articles word-for-word shortly after they're published without a prominent link back to the sources. They included several examples in their complaint.

The Intercept, Raw Story and AlterNet filed separate lawsuits accusing ChatGPT of reproducing news content "verbatim or nearly verbatim" while stripping out important attribution like the author's name. OpenAI asked a court to dismiss that claim, saying the NYT took advantage of a ChatGPT bug that made it recite articles word for word.

U.S. antitrust enforcers are opening an investigation into the relationships between leading artificial intelligence startups such as ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and Anthropic and the tech giants that have invested billions of dollars into them. "We're scrutinizing whether these ties enable dominant firms to exert undue influence or gain privileged access in ways that could undermine fair competition," said Lina Khan, chair of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, in opening remarks at a Thursday AI forum. Khan said the market inquiry would review "the investments and partnerships being formed between AI developers and major cloud service providers." The FTC said on Thursday that it has issued "compulsory orders" to five companies -- cloud providers Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and AI startups Anthropic and OpenAI -- requiring them to provide information regarding investments and partnerships. Microsoft's close and years-long relationship with OpenAI is the best known of the partnerships.

The New York Times has sued Microsoft and OpenAI for using its content to help develop artificial intelligence services, in a sign of the increasingly fraught relationship between the media and a technology that could upend the news industry. The Times didn't specify its monetary demands. OpenAI has faced criticism for scraping text widely from the web to train its popular chatbot since it debuted a year ago. While it has been sued by prominent authors, this is the first challenge to its practices by a major media organization. The startup has sought licensing deals with publishers, much like Alphabet's Google and Meta Platforms' Facebook have done in recent years.

In a complaint filed Wednesday, the Times said the technology companies exploited its content without permission to create their AI products, including OpenAI's humanlike chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft's Copilot. The tools were trained on millions of pieces of Times content, the suit said, and draw on that material to serve up answers to users' prompts.

At around 11:30 a.m. on the Friday before Thanksgiving, Microsoft's chief executive, Satya Nadella, was having his weekly meeting with senior leaders when a panicked colleague told him to pick up the phone. An executive from OpenAI, an artificial-intelligence startup into which Microsoft had invested a reported thirteen billion dollars, was calling to explain that within the next twenty minutes the company's board would announce that it had fired Sam Altman, OpenAI's C.E.O. and co-founder. It was the start of a five-day crisis that some people at Microsoft began calling the Turkey-Shoot Clusterfuck. Nadella has an easygoing demeanor, but he was so flabbergasted that for a moment he didn't know what to say. He'd worked closely with Altman for more than four years and had grown to admire and trust him.

The past few weeks have seen major AI announcements by Microsoft, OpenAI, Google, and other organizations. Tech companies are scrambling to solidify their position in the fast-expanding market for large language models (LLM) and generative AI. And as big tech continues to pour more money into the field, competition is gradually becoming polarized between Microsoft and Google. So far, Microsoft has proven to be craftier and more capable in getting LLMs generative machine learning models to work in its products. But the race is not over, and we might yet see Google (or some other company) take the lead.