LiDAR place recognition is a crucial module in localization that matches the current location with previously observed environments. Most existing approaches in LiDAR place recognition dominantly focus on the spinning type LiDAR to exploit its large FOV for matching. However, with the recent emergence of various LiDAR types, the importance of matching data across different LiDAR types has grown significantly-a challenge that has been largely overlooked for many years. To address these challenges, we introduce HeLiOS, a deep network tailored for heterogeneous LiDAR place recognition, which utilizes small local windows with spherical transformers and optimal transport-based cluster assignment for robust global descriptors. Our overlap-based data mining and guided-triplet loss overcome the limitations of traditional distance-based mining and discrete class constraints. HeLiOS is validated on public datasets, demonstrating performance in heterogeneous LiDAR place recognition while including an evaluation for long-term recognition, showcasing its ability to handle unseen LiDAR types. We release the HeLiOS code as an open source for the robotics community at https://github.com/minwoo0611/HeLiOS.

OpenAI Chief Scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever is leaving the artificial intelligence company, a departure that ends months of speculation in Silicon Valley about the future of a top AI researcher who played a key role in the brief ouster of Sam Altman last year. Sutskever will be replaced by Research Director Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI said on its blog Tuesday. In a post on X, Sutskever called trajectory of OpenAI "miraculous" and said that he was confident the company will build AI that is "both safe and beneficial" under its current leadership. The exit removes an executive and renowed researcher who has played a pivotal role in the company since its earliest days, helping guide discussions over the safety of AI technology and at times differing with Altman over strategy. When OpenAI was founded in 2015, he served as its research director after being recruited to join the company by Elon Musk.

OpenAI is reinstating CEO Sam Altman to its board of directors and said it has "full confidence" in his leadership after an outside investigation into the turmoil that led the company to abruptly fire and rehire him in November. OpenAI said the investigation by the law firm WilmerHale concluded that Altman's ouster had been a "consequence of a breakdown in the relationship and loss of trust" between Altman and the prior board. The ChatGPT maker also said it has added three women to its board of directors: Sue Desmond-Hellman, a former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Nicole Seligman, a former Sony general counsel; and Instacart CEO Fidji Simo. The actions are a way for the San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company to show investors and customers that it is trying to move past the internal conflicts that nearly destroyed it last year and made global headlines. "I'm pleased this whole thing is over," Altman told reporters Friday, adding that he's been disheartened to see people leaking information to try to "pit us against each other" and demoralize the team. At the same time, he said he's learned from the experience and apologized for a dispute with a former board member he could have handled "with more grace and care".

Let us be thankful for the AI industry. Its leaders may be nudging humans closer to extinction, but this year, they provided us with a gloriously messy spectacle of progress. When I say "year," I mean the long year that began late last November, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and, in doing so, launched generative AI into the cultural mainstream. In the months that followed, politicians, teachers, Hollywood screenwriters, and just about everyone else tried to understand what this means for their future. Cash fire-hosed into AI companies, and their executives, now glowed up into international celebrities, fell into Succession-style infighting.

Some senior employees described Sam Altman as psychologically abusive, creating chaos at OpenAI. The complaints were a major factor in the board’s decision to fire the CEO.

Microsoft will take a non-voting, observer position on OpenAI's board, CEO Sam Altman said in his first official missive after taking back the reins of the company on Wednesday. The observer position means Microsoft's representative can attend OpenAI's board meetings and access confidential information, but it does not have voting rights on matters including electing or choosing directors. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who had recruited Altman to Microsoft after Altman's ouster from OpenAI, had said earlier that governance at the ChatGPT maker needs to change. OpenAI announced a new initial board last week that consists of former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chair and Larry Summers, former US treasury secretary. Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, who was part of the board who fired Altman, also stayed on.

The latest development came after a chaotic weekend, where OpenAI investors and employees, blindsided by the board's move to fire Altman on Friday, mounted a campaign to get him reinstated. In its vague statement explaining the rationale for his ouster, OpenAI had said Altman wasn't always "candid" in his communications with them. The news reverberated through Silicon Valley and the halls of government, where Altman had become a major influencer of policy and regulation on AI.

Two of the board members who voted Altman out worked for think tanks backed by Open Philanthropy, a tech billionaire-backed foundation that supports projects preventing AI from causing catastrophic risk to humanity: Helen Toner, the director of strategy and foundational research grants for Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, and Tasha McCauley, whose LinkedIn profile says she began work as an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation earlier this year. Toner has previously spoken at conferences for a philanthropic movement closely tied to AI safety. McCauley is also involved in the work.

OpenAI's firing of Sam Altman followed wide-ranging disagreements between the chief executive officer and his board -- in particular Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and the company's chief scientist -- according to a person familiar with the matter. The debates included differences of opinion on AI safety, the speed of development of the technology and the commercialization of the company, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information. Altman's ambitions may have also played a role in the divorce. Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp., according to a person with knowledge of the investment proposal. Altman was also courting SoftBank Group chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new company to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive.

Deep Forestry has built a push-button autonomous survey drone, powered by Ouster lidar, for dense cluttered environments such as industrial buildings, warehouses, or underground tunnels. Their foremost surveying task is forest or agricultural inventory management, carbon credit monitoring, and biodiversity protection. These surveying tasks require more than data capture alone - they need to also analyze and compute what is being mapped by the drone. Armed with this information, forestry and agricultural management services are able to make informed decisions in line with their business goals as well as their sustainability and climate goals. Headquartered in Northern Europe - Deep Forestry built one of the world's first three dimensional deep learning biodiversity classification algorithms.