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Resending: ☕️ Altman Back at OpenAI's Helm
As the week slowly gets started, Sam Altman returns to OpenAI's Board of Directors as the CEO once again after a lengthy investigation, concluding that his firing was unwarranted. But it's not over for the AI giant yet, as Elon Musk provokes OpenAI by making Grok open source amidst his lawsuit with the company. Meanwhile, Midjourney tries to make the lives of its users easier with a "character reference" test feature, and the U.S. Air Force looks to beef up its arsenal with new AI drones. Join us at AI Tangle as we untangle this week's happenings.
THE BIG AI STORY
An independent investigation carried out by law firm WinterHale on OpenAI's nonprofit plea has found that the removal of Sam Altman from the CEO position "did not mandate removal," leading to his reinstatement in the Board of Directors and the appointment of some additional board members. Bret Taylor, Chair of the OpenAI Board, stated in a press release that WinterHale interviewed board members, employees, and "over 30,000" documents to reach their conclusion - Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman "are the right leaders for OpenAI."
What do we know?
Details on Altman's removal remain scarce, with OpenAI employees dubbing the incident "The Blip" due to trust and relationship faltering between Altman and the board members. Questions specifically surrounding co-founder Ilya Sutskever, a key player in the failed coup, also remain unclear, though Altman has expressed his wishes to continue collaborating with Sutskever despite the situation. OpenAI also said it planned to "strengthen" its conflict of interest policy for employees with little detail, additionally adding an anonymous reporting hotline for employees and contractors.
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6 QUICK HITS
Elon Musk, a self-proclaimed advocate for open-source technology, recently announced that his AI startup xAI will open its doors to its chatbot Grok, making it open source, contrasting with his lawsuit against OpenAI over alleged deviation from the company's original goal of open-source AI development. Musk's legal action sparked a debate on open-source AI's merits with Vinod Khosla, whose firm was an early backer of OpenAI, calling it a "distraction" and Marc Andreessen from venture company a16z defending open research and ridiculing Khosla in return.
The Pentagon will be offering two contracts to develop new, high-end AI-piloted drones to bolster the U.S. Air Force, with five major private companies competing for the spots: Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, General Atomics, and Anduril Industries. So far, only Boeing has unveiled its entry, dubbed the Ghost Bat, a drone designed to work with current military technology and "complement and extend airborne missions" on top of being a low-cost design, which seems to be right up the Pentagon's alley.
Midjourney, the popular AI image generation service, recently announced a new test feature, dubbed "cref," or "character reference," with which the developers state that their models will be able to more consistently generate characters across prompts, something that has eluded image generation for a while. The cref tag takes a URL as input, from which the model will try to match the character's facial features, body type, and even clothing. Although user feedback has been positive, the feature requires refinement as it doesn't produce a perfect match.
The poster child of AI chips, Nvidia, has recently been sued by three book authors for using copyrighted material in its NeMo AI platform without permission. The platform, trained on a dataset of almost 200,000 books, was taken down in October of last year "due to reported copyright infringement," which authors Brian Keene, Abdi Nazemian, and Stewart O'Nan state that it effectively acts as Nvidia admitting to training NeMo on, prompting a class action lawsuit. The lawsuit seeks compensation for the people of the United States whose work was used in the three years of training Nvidia's NeMo platform.
With ambitions to build a full-stack artificial general intelligence, SuperAGI has come out of its Series A round of funding with $10 million, led by WhatsApp founder Jan Koum's secretive venture firm Newlands VC. SuperAGI builds its models, such as SAM-7B and VEagle, on large agentic models, or LAMs, which many see as a step above the currently widespread large language models (LLMs), used by ChatGPT and Gemini, as the Series A funding will go towards further research, middleware, and software applications.
Applied Intuition, founded in 2017 to develop autonomous systems for vehicles, recently secured $250 million in Series E funding, putting the company at a $6 billion valuation. Led by lucrative venture firms like Lux Capital's Bilal Zuberi, investor Elad Gil, and Porsche Investments Management, showing that the growing interest in AI for the car industry doesn't seem to be slowing down anytime soon, especially as the company claims to be working with "18 of the top 20 automakers," including the likes of General Motors, Volkswagen and Toyota.
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