| Here's what's in today's AI briefing: - OpenAI to appoint new board members this month.
- Elon Musk sues OpenAI, claiming it has abandoned its mission to benefit humanity.
- Dell shares soar to record high amid enthusiasm for AI servers.
- Study: GPT-4 outperforms humans in creative "divergent thinking" tasks.
- Photomath AI now part of Google's app lineup.
Beth
p/beth-duckett | |
| 1 | | OpenAI plans to appoint several new members to its board this month, a source told the Washington Post. After the temporary removal of CEO Sam Altman led to an overhaul of OpenAI's governing board, the company has been actively seeking six new members with expertise in technology, safety, and other areas. More: - The board now consists of former Salesforce CEO Bret Taylor, who is chair, along with former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and prior member Adam D'Angelo, co-founder and CEO of Quora.
- Summers and Taylor were appointed to oversee the board temporarily and choose a new, permanent one.
- Taylor said he'd depart from the board once it's fully staffed and the company is stable.
- OpenAI investor Microsoft will take a non-voting, observer position on OpenAI's board.
- Sources told Reuters earlier that OpenAI investors were unlikely to secure a board seat.
Zoom out: - OpenAI's board ended Altman's employment on Nov. 17 following a "breakdown of communications."
- Less than a week later, Altman was re-hired.
- The change to OpenAI's board "is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said.
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| 2 | | Elon Musk has sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, accusing them of abandoning the company's founding mission by placing profits over humanity. Musk, a co-founder of OpenAI who is no longer involved, claims that the original mission was to run the company as an open-source nonprofit focused on advancing AI to benefit humanity. More: - In the lawsuit, Musk claims Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman convinced him to finance OpenAI as a nonprofit in 2015.
- Under the founding agreement, the company would make its AI technology "freely available" to the public.
- The lawsuit argues that OpenAI has since "transformed into a closed-source de facto subsidiary of the largest technology company in the world: Microsoft."
- Musk's legal team claims that OpenAI and co-founders broke the original agreement by limiting access to the company's tech to maximize profit.
- The lawsuit seeks a court order that would force OpenAI to return to open source and prevent it and Microsoft from profiting off the technology.
Zoom out: - Musk resigned from OpenAI's board in 2018 and no longer holds a stake, but he continued to fund the company until late 2020, according to a court filing.
- Last year, Musk launched his own for-profit AI startup, X.ai, along with its first product, Grok, a chatbot focused on "free speech."
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| 3 | | Shares of Dell Technologies soared 32% to a record high on Friday, driven by a positive annual forecast and strong demand for its AI-optimized servers. Dell's shares hit $124.59 at Friday's close, marking its best single-day gain and the highest price since Dell returned to the public markets in 2018. 
What the numbers show: Dell's stock has tripled in the past year amid enthusiasm over the role of its servers in the rapidly growing AI market, according to Bloomberg. Dell's infrastructure unit, including servers, earned $9.3B in its fiscal Q4, exceeding Wall Street expectations. The company reported a rise in sales of AI-optimized servers, shipping $800M for the quarter. However, chip shortages are stalling further expansion, according to Dell COO Jeff Clarke. Quotable: "We've just started to touch the AI opportunities ahead of us, and we believe Dell is uniquely positioned with our broad portfolio to help customers build GenAI solutions that meet performance, cost, and security requirements," Clarke said. The bigger picture: Nvidia's stock rose 4% after Dell's earnings report, boosting the former's market cap to $2.06T, making it the third-largest company by market cap behind Microsoft and Apple. Other AI-related chipmakers like Broadcom and Marvell Technology rose about 8%, and AMD shares jumped over 5%. | | | |
| 4 | | In a new study, OpenAI's GPT-4 outperformed humans in divergent thinking tasks, which involves creating unique solutions to open-ended questions. The AI model showed greater "creative potential" across the thinking tasks when compared to humans, even after adjusting for its fluency in responses, according to the study published in Scientific Reports. More: - The study by University of Arkansas researchers compared GPT-4's performance to 151 human participants.
- It involved three tests:
- The Alternative Use Task, which asks for creative uses of items like a rope or fork;
- The Consequences Task, imagining outcomes of hypothetical scenarios; and
- The Divergent Associations Task, which asks to generate nouns that are semantically distant.
- Researchers then gauged the responses for quantity, length, and semantic variation between words.
Results: - While GPT-4 was overall "more original and elaborate" than humans on each test, the authors noted that the measures represent creative potential.
- Unlike humans, AI has no agency and depends on human users, so AI's creative potential is "in a constant state of stagnation unless prompted."
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| 5 | | Photomath, a widely used AI tool for solving math problems, is now officially part of Google's app lineup. The app allows users to solve math problems by photographing them, offering step-by-step solutions. More: - Originally launched in Croatia in 2014, Photomath was acquired by Google in May 2022.
- The tech giant gained regulatory approval last March and later closed the deal.
- A year later, the app is now officially under Google's publisher account on its Play Store as well as Apple's App Store.
Zoom out: - Photomath's AI, capable of text recognition and problem-solving, could be further integrated into Google's Lens and Search.
- Since its launch, the app has gained over 100 million downloads and has a 4.5-star rating on the Play Store and a 4.8-star rating on the App Store.
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| 6 | | Weekly roundup — The top AI stories you might have missed this week: - The SEC is investigating OpenAI to determine whether investors were misled during last year's company shakeup. The SEC is studying internal communications by CEO Sam Altman linked to his temporary ouster by OpenAI's board in November.
- Robotics startup Figure AI signed a deal with OpenAI to develop next-generation AI models for the former's humanoid robots. California-based Figure also announced a new $675M venture capital boost from notable investors like Jeff Bezos, Microsoft, Nvidia, and others, valuing the company at $2.6B.
- Apple ended development on its long-rumored self-driving car, shifting many of its team members to work on generative AI projects. Apple is "investing significantly" in generative AI and will release software features to users "later this year," CEO Tim Cook said.
- Microsoft signed a multiyear partnership with France's Mistral AI, including taking a minority stake in the OpenAI competitor. Microsoft will launch Mistral's AI models to its cloud customers. The EU is now looking into the partnership, part of a wider review of the generative AI industry, to see if it poses competition concerns.
- AI models from OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic, and Mistral often produce inaccurate responses to election-related questions, according to a new report by the AI Democracy Projects. Researchers found that 51% of the chatbots' responses were inaccurate, 40% harmful, 38% incomplete, and 13% biased. The models sometimes misdirected voters to nonexistent polling places and could generate hallucinations and answers based on outdated data.
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 | AI and technology writer | | Beth is a contributing editor and writer of Inside's AI and Tech newsletters. She has written for publications including USA Today, the Arizona Business Gazette, and The Arizona Republic, where she received recognition with a Pulitzer Prize nomination and a First Amendment Award for collaborative reporting on state pension cost increases. You can reach her at Beth.Duckett@yahoo.com. | | This newsletter was edited by Aaron Crutchfield | |
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