IBL News

Category: Top News

  • AI Developments Will Speed Up with the Defeat of Anti-Altman Allies

    AI Developments Will Speed Up with the Defeat of Anti-Altman Allies

    IBL News | New York

    Will AI now move faster and be less controlled?

    It seems that the chaotic events of the last week at OpenAI have sped everything up, according to most observers.

    Those warning about the risks of AI lost the battle on the drama over the control of 90 billion’s start-up OpenAI as two of the three external board members were replaced, and the outed CEO Sam Altman was reinstated.

    It all took place within a week, and it resulted this way thanks to the support of Microsoft and investors — the money component — and over 90% of the employees to Altman.

    Created to build a machine version of AGI, OpenAI has been building it as fast as possible while, strategically, its CEO has been pushing an anti-competitive regulatory environment by warning that the innovation on AI is becoming extremely dangerous and governments should get involved.

    Many in tech think that Sam Altman was just trying to get governments to ban competition, especially the open-source models.

    Those at OpenAI who think capitalism impulse should slow down and be careful with AI — the majority of a board hired to do that — mounted a coup against those who think innovation — and therefore profits — should speed up.

    However, the reality is that even machine-learning scientists don’t know when AGI will be achieved, as it is mostly an abstract concept.

    Part of the problem and conflict when it comes to discussing AGI is that it’s an abstract concept.

    “ChatGPT might scale all the way to the Terminator in five years, or in five decades, or it might not,” wrote The Financial Times.

    “Failed coups often accelerate the thing that they were trying to prevent.”
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  • Anthropic Introduced an Upgraded Version of Its Conversational AI Assistant

    Anthropic Introduced an Upgraded Version of Its Conversational AI Assistant

    IBL News | New York

    Anthropic released this month Claude 2.1, an upgraded version of its conversational AI assistant, which powers the claude.ai chat experience. It improves its pricing and includes improvements in areas like context length, accuracy, and integration capabilities.

    Claude 2.1 can now process up to 200,000 context tokens, equivalent to around 150,000 words or 500 pages of material. That’s twice as much as its previous token limit.

    It means that users can now upload technical documentation like entire codebases, financial statements like S-1s, or even long literary works like The Iliad or The Odyssey.

    “By being able to talk to large bodies of content or data, Claude can summarize, perform Q&A, forecast trends, and compare and contrast multiple documents,” said the company.

    Anthropic stated that Claude 2.1 reduces significantly hallucinated statements and takes more contextual information, aiming to provide better summaries, question answering, trend forecasting, and other insights.

    Claude 2.1 shows expanded interoperability for day-to-day business operations, although the tool use feature remains in early development. As a result, it might answer a question by querying a private database rather than guessing, translating natural language requests into API calls.

    In other words, with this API tool, the model will decide which tool is required to achieve the task and execute an action on their behalf, such as:

    • Using a calculator for complex numerical reasoning
    • Translating natural language requests into structured API calls
    • Answering questions by searching databases or using a web search API
    • Taking simple actions in software via private APIs
    • Connecting to product datasets to make recommendations and help users complete purchases

    The Claude 2.1 upgrade is already live for Anthropic’s hosted chatbot interface at claude.ai and the paid Claude Pro API tier.

    The 200,000 token context limit is exclusive to Pro users for now on its website, similarly priced to the (currently paused) ChatGPT Plus subscription at $20/month.

    Perplexity Pro subscribers can also use Claude 2.1 by changing the model used in Settings. The platform is also offering two months for free for those who want to give it a try.

    In addition to the new version of Claude 2.1, Anthropic introduced system prompts, which allow users to provide custom instructions and context in order to improve performance.

    System prompts allow users to set goals, specify Claude’s persona or tone and take on specified personalities and roles, structure responses, establish rules and constraints, supply relevant background knowledge, and define standards for verifying outputs.

    By prompting Claude in this way, users can shape more accurate, consistent responses that stay in character for role-playing and more reliably follow provided guidelines.

    System prompts ultimately aim to enhance Claude’s capabilities for intended real-world applications. 

    Founded in 2021, Anthropic develops AI assistant technology focused on safety, honesty, and control. It recently received an investment of $4 billion from Amazon to continue advancing AI with more capable models.
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  • AI Agents, the Second Phase of Generative AI

    AI Agents, the Second Phase of Generative AI

    IBL News | New York

    After the release of the bot ChatGPT a year ago, the second phase of personalized, autonomous AI agents is emerging.

    These agents can perform complex tasks, such as sending emails, scheduling meetings, booking flights or tables in a restaurant, or even complex tasks like buying presents for family members or negotiating a raise.

    Personalized chatbots, programmed for specific tasks, that GPT creators will be able to release through the upcoming OpenAI’s GPT Store, are a prelude.

    For now, these custom GPTs are easy to build without knowing how to code.

    Users just answer a few simple questions about their bot — its name, its purpose, the tone used to respond — and the bot builds itself in just a few seconds. Users can upload PDF documents they want to use as reference material or easily look up Q&A. They can also connect the bot to other apps or edit its instructions.

    Although these custom chatbots are far from working perfectly, they can be useful tools for answering repetitive questions in customer service departments.

    Some AI safety researchers fear that giving bots more autonomy could lead to disaster, The New York Times reported. The Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit research organization, listed autonomous agents as one of its “catastrophic AI risks” this year, saying that “malicious actors could intentionally create rogue AI with dangerous goals.”

    For now, these agents look harmless and limited in their scope.

    Its development seems to be dependent on gradual iterative deployment, that is, small improvements at a fast pace rather than a big leap.

    In the last OpenAI developer conference, Sam Atman built on stage a “start-up mentor” chatbot to give advice to aspiring founders, based on an uploaded file of a speech he had given years earlier.

    The San Francisco-based research lab envisions a world where AI agents will be extensions of us, gathering information and taking action on our behalf.
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    For now, OpenAI’s bots are limited to simple, well-defined tasks, and can’t handle complex planning or long sequences of actions.
    After a day care’s handbook was uploaded to OpenAI’s GPT creator tool, a chatbot could easily look up answers to questions about it.
    A screenshot of a GPT “Day Care Helper” conversation between the author and the chatbot about circle time.

     

  • 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.
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  • 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.