🥣 Sam Altman to MSFT?

PLUS: Meta Disbands Responsible AI Team

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The AI Crunch
November 21, 2023

Read time: 2.5 minutes

Hey there, AI aficionados! Welcome to another edition of The AI Crunch, where we dive deep into the world of artificial intelligence, minus the complexity. Big news - we've lifted those pesky website passwords for unrestricted access to all our content. Plus, drumroll, please... we've contacted the winner of the much-anticipated Humane AI Pin! Stay tuned for more AI breakthroughs and insights. Let's jump right in!

Top News

OpenAI CEO Saga (Timeline of Events):

  • Last Thursday, 4 of 6 OpenAI board members, led by Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, staged a coup to remove Sam, saying that it was the “only path” to stay true to OpenAI's mission of building safe AGI

  • At noon on Friday, Sam Altman was informed by the board that he was being fired, and Mira Murati became the Interim CEO

  • At 12:23 pm, Greg Brockman, President and Co-founder of OpenAI, learned about the change in leadership from Ilya Sutskever

  • At 12:25 pm, the public got the news through a statement.

    Sam confirmed his firing on Twitter

  • A few hours later, Greg Brockman quit, expressing disappointment in the board

  • Friday late night, 17th Nov 2023: Three senior researchers at OpenAI left

  • On Sunday, there were rumors of of mass resignations contingent on Sam's return to the CEO position

  • The deadline passed with no update, until the final word: though interim CEO Mira Murati advocated to rehire Sam and Greg, the board decided to hire former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear instead

  • This means that Sam Altman is might not as CEO of OpenAI, a decision that has reportedly left Microsoft “NOT pleased”

  • Sam Altman was also raising a new VC fund for hard tech when he was fired

  • In a another twist to the story, Satya announced that Sam and Greg will join Microsoft to create a new advanced AI research team

  • On Monday, 95% of OpenAI employees threaten to follow Sam Altman out the door

  • Currently, Sam Altman is still trying to return as OpenAI CEO

News

Quick bites to start your morning:

  • Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team (TV)

  • LlamaIndex 0.9 has been released with a group of new features (MD)

  • NVIDIA with Microsoft Azure released Foundry family of models (NV)

  • Menlo Ventures raised $1.35B for new AI fund (MV)

  • ChatGPT gets memory… first steps to becoming copilot for the mind (X)

  • GPT-4 vs. humans on abstraction and reasoning tasks (ARX)

  • Actors are concerned about AI terms in the new SAG-AFTRA contract (M)

  • WhatsApp adds a button that lets you chat with Meta AI (M)

  • Germany, France, and Italy agreed on a framework for AI regulation (R)

  • Anthropic in legal trouble for training AI on copyrighted lyrics (R)

  • Discord to shut down its AI chatbot Clyde (TV)

AI Funding

Artisan AI: AI startup that plans to build human-like digital workers raised $2M

Siena: AI customer support platform raised $5M

CreateSafe: AI music platform raised $5M

CodeGen: AI code generation platform raised $16M

Civitai: AI content marketplace raised $5M

OfferFit: AI content experimentation platform raised $25M

Cytovale: Raised $84M to create diagnostic tests called IntelliSep

SienAI: Raised $5M for it’s autonomous AI chatbot platform

Haut AI: AI skincare company raised $2M

AI Tools

Newest AI tools (AI Tool Leaderboards):

Other

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