IBL News

Author: IBL News

  • Google’s Bard Now Understands YouTube’s Videos Offering to Have a Richer Conversation

    Google’s Bard Now Understands YouTube’s Videos Offering to Have a Richer Conversation

    IBL News | New York

    Google’s Bard announced this week that it will offer an understanding of YouTube videos so that users can have a richer conversation.

    “We’re taking the first steps in Bard’s ability to understand YouTube videos. For example, if you’re looking for videos on how to make olive oil cake, you can now also ask how many eggs the recipe in the first video requires,” said the company in a post.

    In addition, Google reported that Bard can help with math equations, as well as with data visualization, as it’s able to generate charts from prompts.
    .

  • OpenAI Researchers Warned the Board of an AI Discovery that Could Threaten Humanity, Reuters Says

    OpenAI Researchers Warned the Board of an AI Discovery that Could Threaten Humanity, Reuters Says

    IBL News | New York

    Four days ahead of Sam Altman‘s ouster, several staff researchers wrote a letter to the board of directors warning of a powerful AI discovery, called Project Q*, that they said could threaten humanity. Reuters reported yesterday about it quoting as sources two people familiar with the matter.

    This unreported letter was a key development for Altman’s firing, the poster child of Gen AI who would triumphantly return late Tuesday.

    This letter was one factor among a longer list of grievances of the board which reflected the concerns over commercializing advances before understanding the consequences.

    Some at OpenAI believe Q* (pronounced Q-Star) could be a breakthrough in the startup’s search for what’s known as artificial general intelligence (AGI), one of the people told Reuters.

    OpenAI defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.

    Researchers consider math to be a frontier of generative AI development. Currently, generative AI is good at writing and language translation by statistically predicting the next word, and answers to the same question can vary widely. But conquering the ability to do math — where there is only one right answer — implies AI would have greater reasoning capabilities resembling human intelligence. This could be applied to novel scientific research, for instance, AI researchers believe.

    Unlike a calculator that can solve a limited number of operations, AGI can generalize, learn, and comprehend.

    There has long been discussion among computer scientists about the danger posed by highly intelligent machines, for instance, if they might decide that the destruction of humanity was in their interest.

    Altman has drawn investment and computing resources from Microsoft to get closer to AGI. Now he is back some analysts say that he may have fewer checks on power.

     

  • Sam Altman Reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO

    Sam Altman Reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO

    IBL News | New York

    Sam Altman will be reinstated as OpenAI’s CEO, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by employees and investors.

    Yesterday, OpenAI said it had reached a deal in principle for Sam Altman to return as CEO, with a new board chaired by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor.

    The board will be remade without several members who had opposed Mr. Altman.

    “We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D’Angelo,” OpenAI said in a post to X. “We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.”

    Altman’s return should quell what was an all-out revolt by OpenAI employees against his removal and mark the beginning of the end of one of the most-watched corporate sagas in tech history.

    Adam D’Angelo, the CEO of the website Quora and a former early Facebook employee, was already a member of the OpenAI board, but other previous board members will not remain.

    The outgoing members include tech entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, and Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

    On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that the board had been bickering for more than a year on questions about the safe development of AI, including how quickly to roll out the technology while ensuring humans do not lose control of it. Altman was on the side of moving quickly, the newspaper reported.

    Altman said in a separate statement on X that he was happy to return as CEO.

    “i love openai, and everything i’ve done over the past few days has been in service of keeping this team and its mission together,” he wrote, eschewing traditional punctuation.

    Altman added that, with the new board in place, he was “looking forward to returning” and “building on our strong partnership” with Microsoft.

    OpenAI and Microsoft have a longstanding partnership, with Microsoft having invested in the startup and OpenAI using Microsoft’s cloud computing services.

    Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X that Microsoft is “encouraged by the changes to the OpenAI board. We believe this is a first essential step on a path to more stable, well-informed, and effective governance.”

    Other OpenAI executives celebrated the decision.

    Mira Murati, who was briefly interim CEO after Altman’s ouster, reposted the OpenAI announcement late Tuesday with a simple blue heart emoji. Greg Brockman, the startup’s president, and a co-founder, wrote on X, “Returning to OpenAI & getting back to coding tonight.”

    Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who was among the first donors to OpenAI when it was a nonprofit, said that Altman’s return was better than one alternative: Altman and most of OpenAI’s employees going to work for Microsoft.

    “Less concentration of power,” Musk wrote on X.

    Meanwhile, the company rolled out a new voice feature for ChatGPT on Tuesday with a subtle joke about the situation.

     

     

  • OpenAI’s Employees Threat to Go to Microsoft If Board Doesn’t Quit

    OpenAI’s Employees Threat to Go to Microsoft If Board Doesn’t Quit

    IBL News | New York

    The chaos inside OpenAI continues this week.

    Yesterday, nearly all of OpenAI’s employees — including Ilya Sutskever, the chief scientist and board member who initially pushed to remove CEO Sam Altman — threatened to quit and follow ousted Altman to work at the company’s biggest investor, Microsoft Corp, unless the current board resigns.

    On the other hand, some investors in OpenAI are considering suing the company’s board. They worry that they can lose hundreds of millions of dollars they invested in OpenAI, a crown jewel in some of their portfolios, with the potential collapse of the hottest startup in the rapidly growing generative AI sector.

    More than 700 of the AI firm’s roughly 770 employees signed a letter on Monday addressed to OpenAI’s board stating that the signatories are “unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgment and care for our mission and employees.”

    The letter called for every member of the board to resign and for Altman to be reinstated, or else employees might jump to Microsoft. The software giant “has assured us there are positions for all OpenAI employees,” the letter said.

    Among the many employees and executives who signed the letter were Murati, OpenAI’s chief technology officer who had been named interim CEO on Friday, and Ilya Sutskever, an OpenAI co-founder and board member who has been seen as instrumental in the board’s actions.

    “I deeply regret my participation in the board’s actions,” Ilya Sutskever wrote in a post on X, formerly Twitter, on Monday. “I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we’ve built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.”

    The extraordinary threat of a mass exodus followed a roller-coaster weekend during which OpenAI’s board defied calls from its investors and top executives to reinstate Altman, who was fired following disagreements with the board on how fast to develop and monetize artificial intelligence.

    OpenAI executives — including then-interim CEO Mira Murati, Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap and Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon — were negotiating with the board to bring Altman back to the company into Sunday night, according to Bloomberg.

    Instead, the board named a new leader — former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear — and Microsoft hired Altman and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman to head up a new in-house AI team.

    Altman clashed with members of his board, especially Sutskever, the company’s chief scientist, over how quickly to develop generative AI, how to commercialize products, and the steps needed to lessen their potential harm to the public, people with knowledge of the matter said.

    OpenAI’s other board members included Adam D’Angelo, the co-founder and CEO of Quora; Tasha McCauley, CEO of GeoSim Systems; and Helen Toner, director of strategy and foundational research grants at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

    Alongside rifts over strategy, board members also contended with Altman’s entrepreneurial ambitions. Altman has been looking to raise tens of billions of dollars from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds to create an AI chip startup to compete with processors made by Nvidia Corp.

    Altman was courting SoftBank Group Corp. chairman Masayoshi Son for a multibillion-dollar investment in a new business to make AI-oriented hardware in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive.

  • Microsoft Hires Sam Altman While OpenAI Names a New CEO

    Microsoft Hires Sam Altman While OpenAI Names a New CEO

    IBL News | New York

    In another major shakeup, Microsoft announced through its CEO Satya Nadella on Monday that he hired OpenAI co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman to lead up a new AI research team.

    This move took place after three days of intense discussions following the unexpected decision by OpenAI’s board to fire Sam Altman. Brockmann quit as OpenAI president after Altman was fired.

    Meanwhile, the OpenAI board appointed former Twitch chief executive and co-founder Emmett Shear as its interim chief executive. He replaces Mira Murati, who was named interim CEO when Altman was fired. She will return to her role as OpenAI’s chief technology officer.

    “We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter. “And we’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team.”

    Sam Altman will serve as the CEO of the new AI group at Microsoft, which is OpenAI’s biggest financial backer after the giant invested over $10 billion and acquired almost 50% ownership.

    “We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn, and I’m looking forward to having you do the same,” Nadella said.

    Former OpenAI top talent Szymon Sidor, Jakub Pachocki, and Aleksander Madry will join Microsoft with more to follow, Brockman said in a post on X. 

    Numerous prominent business leaders and investors warned that without Altman’s leadership, OpenAI may struggle to maintain its current pace of progress.

    “The mission continues,” said Altman following Nadella announcing that the 38-year-old entrepreneur had joined Microsoft.

    Microsoft’s move comes after a tumultuous weekend that saw an unsuccessful attempt by the OpenAI board, its investors and team members to make the entrepreneur return to the startup.

    “We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett Shear and OAI’s new leadership team and working with them,” Nadella added.

    A number of OpenAI top talent, including CTO Mira Murati, on Monday protested the OpenAI board’s decision, which has prompted many talents to leave the firm. “OpenAI is nothing without its people,” the tweets said.

     

  • Investors and Many Employees Push To Restore Altman as CEO at OpenAI

    Investors and Many Employees Push To Restore Altman as CEO at OpenAI

    IBL News | New York

    Talks at OpenAI to reinstate Sam Altman, led by Microsoft’s CEO, Satya Nadella, continued on Sunday afternoon.

    Sam Altman, CEO at OpenAI, spent the weekend waging a pressure campaign on the start-up’s four-person board of directors who ousted him on Friday afternoon, according to The New York Times. In his countertop to retake control, Altman obtained a groundswell of support from investors, employees and OpenAI executives.

    He himself entered with a guest badge on Sunday at the company headquarters to negotiate his future. He posted on X: “first and last time i ever wear one of these.”

    Altman proposed a series of high-profile tech executives to potentially helm a new board that would be more aligned to his business vision. Over the weekend, Sam Altman made clear to his allies that if he does return, he wants a new board and governance structure.

    Names floated included Bret Taylor, the former co-chief executive of Salesforce, Brian Chesky, the chief executive of Airbnb, Laurene Powell Jobs, founder and president of Emerson Collective, and Sheryl Sandberg, the former chief operating officer of Meta.

    If he doesn’t return, Altman is considering starting his own venture, potentially with talent from OpenAI, according to The Wall Street Journal.

    Bloomberg News also reported some of the details of the discussions.

    Two days after the board fired Altman, different explanations persisted for the initial firing.

    People close to him said the ouster had more to do with disputes around the safety of the company’s artificial-intelligence efforts and a power struggle with one co-founder and board member, Ilya Sutskever.

  • IBM Will Dedicate $500 Million to Invest in Generative AI-Focused Start-Ups

    IBM Will Dedicate $500 Million to Invest in Generative AI-Focused Start-Ups

    IBL News | New York

    IBM announced this month that it is launching a $500 million fund, named Enterprise AI Venture Fund, to invest in generative AI start-ups, regardless of their size, whether they are in early-stage or hyper-growth.

    IBM is the latest tech giant to jump into the AI investing race.

    The company has already invested in Hugging Face’s recent Series D funding round and in HiddenLayer’s Series A round.

    IBM seeks mostly to gain operational expertise in product and engineering and go-to-market strategies by partnering with funded start-ups.

    “AI is slated to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. With the launch of the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund, we’re opening another channel to harness the enormous potential of the AI revolution into tangible, positive outcomes for IBM and the companies we invest in,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President of Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM.

    In September 2023, IBM announced the general availability of the first models in the watsonx Granite model series — a collection of generative AI models to advance the infusion of generative AI into business applications and workflows.

    Earlier this year, IBM also announced plans to host Meta’s Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model within watsonx, furthering the company’s strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to maintain open innovation.

     

  • Sam Altman Fired as CEO of OpenAI and Replaced by CTO Mira Murati

    Sam Altman Fired as CEO of OpenAI and Replaced by CTO Mira Murati

    IBL News | New York

    In an extremely sudden turn of events, Sam Altman was fired as CEO of OpenAI and replaced by CTO Mira Murati as the interim CEO, the company announced on Friday.

    The company will be conducting a search for a permanent CEO successor.

    Employees at OpenAI found out about the news when it was announced publicly, according to multiple sources.

    The removal is a stunning fall for Sam Altman, 38, who over the last year had become one of the tech industry’s most prominent executives. A year ago, OpenAI launched an industrywide AI frenzy when it released ChatGPT.

    “Mr. Altman’s departure follows a deliberative review process by the board, which concluded that he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities,” the company said in its blog post.

    “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”

    “I loved my time at OpenAI,” Altman said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “It was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. Most of all I loved working with such talented people. Will have more to say about what’s next later.”

    OpenAI also announced that co-founder Greg Brockman will be stepping down as chairman of the board, though he will remain at the company.

    OpenAI’s board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, independent directors Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology’s Helen Toner.

    The majority of the board is independent, and the independent directors do not hold equity in OpenAI.

    A longtime tech entrepreneur, Sam Altman helped found OpenAI with the financial backing of Elon Musk in 2015.

    He was one of several tech CEOs to meet with White House leaders, including President Joe Biden, this year to emphasize the importance of ethical and responsible AI development.

    Others wanted Altman and OpenAI to move more cautiously. Elon Musk, who helped found OpenAI before breaking from the group, and dozens of tech leaders, professors, and researchers  urged artificial intelligence labs like OpenAI to stop the training of the most powerful AI systems for at least six months, citing “profound risks to society and humanity.”

    Murati was born and raised in Albania and studied engineering at Dartmouth. She joined OpenAI in 2018. Previously, she managed the product and engineering teams at augmented reality company Ultraleap (then called Leap Motion) and earlier worked at Tesla, where she helped develop the Model X.

    The news shocked AI insiders, analysts, and tech executives alike.

    His removal is a blow to Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in OpenAI and has what amounts to a 49 percent stake in the company.

  • Sam Altman Will Ask More Funding from Microsoft to Push Ahead with the Vision of AGI

    Sam Altman Will Ask More Funding from Microsoft to Push Ahead with the Vision of AGI

    IBL News | New York

    Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, said to the Financial Times that his company will ask for more funding from Microsoft to push ahead with the vision to build out the computing needed to create AGI (artificial general intelligence) — software as intelligent as humans.

    Earlier this year, Microsoft invested $10 billion in OpenAI as part of a multiyear agreement that valued the San Francisco-based company at $29 billion.

    This month, OpenAI announced a GTP Store, or a marketplace similar to Apple’s App Store, with the best apps tailored for specific applications and a shared revenue model with GPT creators.

    “Those are channels into our one single product, which is superintelligence,” Sam Altman said.

    Altman hired Brad Lightcap as his chief operating officer to build out the enterprise business. This executive previously worked at Dropbox and start-up accelerator Y Combinator.

    Currently, OpenAI is working to build more powerful autonomous agents that can perform complex tasks and actions, such as executing code, making payments, sending emails, or filing claims.

    “The amount of business value that will come from being able to do that in every category, I think, is pretty good.”

    The company is also working on GPT-5, the next generation of its AI model, although Altman did not commit to a timeline for its release. The CEO of ChatGPT said it was technically hard to predict exactly what new capabilities and skills the GPT-5 model might have.

    It will require more data to train on, which Altman said would come from a combination of publicly available data sets on the internet, as well as proprietary data from companies.

    OpenAI recently put out a call for large-scale data sets from organizations that “are not already easily accessible online to the public today.”

    To train its models, OpenAI, like most other large AI companies, uses Nvidia’s advanced H100 chips, which are in a supply shortage.

    OpenAI has already taken the lead in the race to build generative AI — systems that can create text, images, code, and other multimedia in seconds.

    Altman said his team believed that language was a “great way to compress information” and, therefore, develop intelligence, a factor he thought that the likes of Google DeepMind had missed.

    He also said “the biggest missing piece” in the race to develop AGI is what is required for such systems to make fundamental leaps of understanding.
    .

  • 2U and USC Terminated Its Partnership for Developing Online Degree Programs

    2U and USC Terminated Its Partnership for Developing Online Degree Programs

    IBL News | New York

    Online program management (OPM) company 2U won’t provide services for the University of Southern California’s (USC) online degree programs from the USC Rossier School of Education, USC Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work, and the USC Iovine and Young Academy, after fifteen years of collaboration.

    “After much thoughtful consideration, 2U and USC have mutually agreed to conclude our relationship,” announced 2U/edX last week in a joint release.

    Over the next 15 months, 2U and USC said they will work together to transfer the delivery and administration of these programs to the university. 

    2U will continue to work with USC on its hybrid online clinical program in physical therapy, according to the announcement.

    USC will pay nearly $26 million to 2U to extract itself from the arrangement, Inside of Higher Ed wrote. Dhawal Shah, CEO and Founder of ClassCentral.com, reported that “as part of this agreement, USC will pay 2U a $40 million break fee.” 

    The announcement comes as USC faces lawsuits over some of its offerings. Graduates of USC’s online master’s in social work sued the university earlier this year, alleging that it presented the program as on par with the on-campus version even though “substantial aspects” were outsourced to 2U.

    The Wall Street Journal’s 2021 article about USC’s social work program became a flashpoint for the Biden administration and congressional Democrats; it was titled “USC Pushed a $115,000 Online Degree. Graduates Got Low Salaries, Huge Debts.”

    Also in 2021, the Los Angeles Times criticized the program’s recruitment tactics in an op-ed titled “USC tarnishes its reputation again, this time with for-profit recruitment tactics.”

    According to the Wall Street Journal, USC paid 2U approximately $398 million from 2013 to 2020.

    Last week, Chip Paucek, CEO at 2U, explained to investors that “The market for degree programs has changed over the years and some programs have become more difficult to run due to their pricing or other factors.”

    Also last week, 2U announced that it would add 50 new programs with six institutions using its flex degree approach, which gives institutions more flexibility in which 2U services they use and changes the agreements’ pricing accordingly.

    The average price of flex degree programs is $40,000, about 50 percent less than our full-model degree programs.

    “We anticipate these new degrees will generate $120 million in revenue at their steady state, effectively replacing the revenue from the degrees phased out through our portfolio management strategy,” said Chip Paucek.

    Dhawal Shah analyzed the trajectory and latest results of 2U, valued below $100 million and with a debt of $883.1 million, and said that 2U has taken over Pearson’s OPM portfolio.