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| Here's a look at today's AI briefing: - Microsoft hires Sam Altman, but investors still want him back as CEO of OpenAI.
- Common Sense Media rates 10 popular AI tools.
- Meta is dispersing its Responsible AI team to other units.
- Amazon is offering free AI courses to anyone.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | Microsoft has hired ex-OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman to lead a new advanced AI research team as the majority of OpenAI's employees have threatened to leave. However, OpenAI's investors, including Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Tiger Global Management, are still working to reinstate Altman at OpenAI as of Monday evening, and Microsoft has indicated it's not opposed to this. Altman is keen to return, sources told Bloomberg. What happened: - OpenAI's board ended Altman's employment on Friday following a "breakdown of communications."
- Reports said Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's chief scientist, spearheaded a board revolt to oust Altman amid a culture clash between the two over the speed of AI commercialization.
- Soon after, supporters and investors, including Microsoft and Thrive Capital, pushed for Altman's reinstatement as CEO.
- However, talks between the parties failed, leading to OpenAI's announcement late Sunday that Altman would not be returning.
Microsoft hiring: - Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella later revealed that Altman, Brockman, and some of their colleagues are joining the tech giant while reaffirming Microsoft's commitment to its partnership with OpenAI.
- However, Microsoft remains open to the return of Altman and Brockman to OpenAI, but with two conditions: the current board must step down, and OpenAI's governance must be revamped to prevent future upheaval, sources told Bloomberg.
- Nadella later said Microsoft is "committed to OpenAI and Sam, irrespective of what configuration."
- Some OpenAI investors are now considering legal action against the company's board.
Employees threaten to resign: - Nearly all of OpenAI's 700-plus employees have threatened to resign in an open letter if Sutskever and other board members do not step down.
- Sutskever also signed the letter. He later wrote in a message that he "deeply regret[s] his participation in the board's actions" and "never intended to harm OpenAI."
- Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has extended job offers to researchers leaving OpenAI, saying the company will match compensation for workers to join its Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese.
New CEO: - On Sunday, OpenAI appointed Emmett Shear, Twitch co-founder, as its interim CEO.
- Shear, OpenAI's third CEO in days, stated that "the process and communications around Sam's removal have been handled very badly, which has seriously damaged our trust."
- He outlined a three-point plan, including the hiring of an independent investigator to examine what led up to Altman's firing.
- Shear said he also plans to reform OpenAI's management and leadership team.
- "I'm not crazy enough to take this job without board support for commercializing our awesome models," Shear said.
Zoom out: - Altman's sudden firing from OpenAI on Friday shocked the tech world as well as Microsoft, a key OpenAI investor, sparking a weekend of uncertainty and speculation about the fate of the ChatGPT creator. The turmoil has raised uncertainty about the future of one of Silicon Valley's fastest-growing companies.
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| 2 | | Common Sense Media, the nonprofit known for rating movies for parents, has given scores to 10 popular AI products based on factors like privacy, ethics, transparency, and safety. 
Details: It's the first time Common Sense has rated AI tools like chatbots and image generators. The "nutrition labels," as it's calling them, focus on areas like trust, privacy, and kids' safety, giving the AI tools an overall rating based on a five-point scale. Findings: According to Axios, Common Sense Media generally found that the AI tools became less safe as they were trained on more data. AI products trained on highly selective data sets were the safest, while those trained on extensive data were the riskiest. Kyron Learning, an AI math tutor for fourth graders, received the top score of five out of five stars overall. Kyron stands out as it doesn't use generative AI but rather relies on conversational AI and dialog modeling to retrieve specific teacher-created videos. Meanwhile, ChatGPT and Bard, both rated at three stars, gather extensive data from common datasets, but the specifics of most of the datasets are unknown. | | | |
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| 3 | | Facebook parent Meta has disbanded its Responsible AI team and is reassigning its members to other company divisions, where they are expected to continue efforts to prevent AI-related harm. The majority of team members will transition to Meta's generative AI team to support cross-company initiatives for responsible AI, according to a company statement. More: - Meta formed the Responsible AI (RAI) team in 2019 to evaluate AI training methods, including data diversity, and prevent AI-related issues on its platforms.
- In the statement, Meta expressed its goal to align staff more closely with the development of core AI products and tech.
- In addition to the generative AI product division, some RAI members will take on AI Infrastructure roles.
- "We continue to prioritize and invest in safe and responsible AI development," a spokesperson said.
Zoom out: - The reshuffling comes after Meta laid off over 20,000 employees in 2022 and 2023, though it plans to increase hiring in 2024.
- Most recently, the company cut jobs in its metaverse custom silicon division.
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| 4 | | Amazon is launching free AI courses to both beginners and experienced users. The company today announced "AI Ready," its program to train at least two million people on AI skills by 2025. More: - The program includes eight free courses on topics like generative AI.
- The courses, open to non-Amazon employees, are available on Amazon's learning website.
- Three of the courses are tailored for business and non-technical users, while the remaining five are specifically for developer and technical audiences.
- A few of the courses highlight Amazon's own AI products, including the CodeWhisperer code generator, AWS machine learning, and Amazon's Bedrock AI for building GenAI applications.
Zoom out: - Amazon said it aims to democratize generative AI education and help tackle the AI talent shortage facing employers.
- A new Access Partnership/Amazon Web Services (AWS) survey revealed that 73% of employers prioritize hiring AI-skilled talent, but 75% of them struggle to meet their AI talent needs.
- Amazon also plans to grant $12M in scholarships to over 50,000 high school and college students for generative AI courses on Udacity.
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| 5 | | AI Events and Conferences: - MLCon 2023, Nov. 28-29, online or Berlin, Germany.
- AI & Big Data Expo Global 2023: Nov. 30-Dec. 1, London, U.K.
- CDAI Apex West: Dec. 5-6, Tempe, Arizona.
- The AI Summit New York: Dec. 6-7, New York, N.Y.
- AI Expo, Powered by AWS, Dec. 9, Austin, Texas.
- AAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Feb. 20-27, 2024, Vancouver, British Columbia.
- Nvidia GTC AI Conference & Expo: March 18-21, 2024, San Jose, California, and virtual.
- Data Innovation Summit: April 25-25, 2024, Stockholm, Sweden, and online.
- 2024 IEEE Conference on Artificial Intelligence: June 25-27, 2024, Singapore.
- The AI Conference: Sept 18-19, 2024, San Francisco.
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- AI software firm C3.ai Inc. laid off an undisclosed number of employees, citing performance issues and a need to cut costs.
- Microsoft blocked the use of the term "Disney" in Bing's AI image generator in response to a viral trend of AI-generated Disney-Pixar-style movie posters featuring dogs as main characters.
- France, Germany, and Italy are opposing strict regulation of AI foundation models in the EU's AI Act, which pits them against other European lawmakers. The three countries agreed on a regulatory framework that promotes innovation, suggesting self-regulation of foundation models through codes of conduct.
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 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is an editor and writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters, with a career spanning journalism since 2007. She has written for publications including The Arizona Republic and USA Today and authored a book on the solar industry in 2016. Reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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