Welcome to this week’s roundup of Earth-based AI news.
This week OpenAI broke records for the most CEOs appointed in 5 days.
An AI girlfriend creator burnt his apartment down because of Donald Trump.
And Argentinian politicians explored their AI creative sides.
Let’s dig in.
These are the days of our AI lives.
The soap opera drama that unfolded at OpenAI this week consumed the AI news real estate. It’s worth reading our coverage as it unfolded for the full stranger-than-fiction experience.
First, the OpenAI board sacked Sam Altman as CEO saying he was “not consistently candid” with them. Co-founder Greg Brockman resigned in solidarity with Altman and CTO Mira Murati was appointed as CEO.
Details of what actually happened and why started to emerge. OpenAI’s staff obviously weren’t happy with the way things were going as most of them said, ‘Bring Sam back or we’re outta here!’
OpenAI investors were like, ‘Um, we know you want to do the whole non-profit save the world thing, but Sam was going to make us some money, so we want him back.’
We learned more about interim CEO Emmett Shear and the rest of the board. It turns out that a Harry Potter fan fiction novel could have been behind a lot of this drama.
Things came full circle as it looks like Sam Altman will be appointed as CEO again under the oversight of a new board.
The company that assures us it has the foresight to manage an AGI just burned through a board and a bunch of CEOs in less than a week.
first and last time i ever wear one of these pic.twitter.com/u3iKwyWj0a
— Sam Altman (@sama) November 19, 2023
Meanwhile
I know it didn’t feel like it, but there was other AI news this week. Microsoft signaled its intent to become the new AGI leader when it made overtures to disgruntled OpenAI staff.
The company also joined the AI hardware market with a pair of custom AI chips. Nvidia is still way out in front with a Q3 report showing it tripled its revenue to $18B.
Anthropic released an upgrade to its Claude model. It now has an industry-leading 200k token context window but its recall is a little iffy.
Some industry pundits say that Google’s Gemini model will “smash GPT-4 by 5X.” We’ll have to wait a bit longer to see if that’s true. Gemini’s release has been pushed out to sometime in 2024.
If you want to join the fun and get a job in AI then check out Amazon’s “AI Ready” education program. Apparently, there’s a huge AI skills shortage that employers need to fill.
Why won’t my girlfriend talk to me?
This week saw a mass AI girlfriend breakup as the Forever Companion service went down. The company’s CEO was arrested for setting fire to his apartment. He had a bit of a meltdown and thought Donald Trump was gassing his home, among some other far-out ideas.
Want to bypass the safety guardrails and get Stable Diffusion and DALL-E to make naughty pics? These researchers use nonsense words in their SneakyPrompts to jailbreak the tools.
YouTube wants to help you make AI music using the voices of real artists. Its new Dream Track feature is really cool.
Meta released its Emu range of generative AI tools. The text-to-image and text-to-video demos look really impressive.
EU vs UK
The EU is still working on getting broad adoption of its AI Safety Act. France, Germany, and Italy just agreed to sign up for even tighter AI regulations.
The UK is heading in the opposite direction saying that it will pursue a pro-innovation approach with no new AI regulation laws in the near future. After the AI Safety Summit it seems they’re taking the ‘Let’s see what happens’ approach.
A new report says AI could give us a four-day workweek by 2033 and the UK government is making big plans to use AI in its public sector.
Another country unlikely to see AI regulations anytime soon is Argentina. They just held their presidential elections and the AI-generated propaganda was next level.
In other news…
Here are some other clickworthy AI stories we enjoyed this week:
- Stability AI released its Stable Diffusion video model and the demos look amazing.
Today, we are releasing Stable Video Diffusion, our first foundation model for generative AI video based on the image model, @StableDiffusion. As part of this research preview, the code, weights, and research paper are now available.
Additionally, today you can sign up for our… pic.twitter.com/0MbV5DDPt2
— Stability AI (@StabilityAI) November 21, 2023
- The CEO of the company that makes an AI mattress topper said its users were losing sleep over the OpenAI drama.
- A programmer used an AI-generated David Attenborough voice to narrate his life.
- Google says AI has the potential to help mitigate 5-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030.
- AI is changing the world of influencer marketing.
And that’s a wrap!
Which OpenAI CEO was your favorite? Did you read Yudowski’s Harry Potter book? If you did, then you’re probably not happy with Sam’s comeback.
Will his passion for AGI give us our four-day workweek or destroy civilization? Either way, AI will have us spending less time in the office.
We were a little distracted by the entertainment OpenAI dished up this week so if we missed a good AI story let us know. And forward this roundup to that friend of yours who never seems to know what’s happening in the AI space.
