🤔 w/148: The OpenAI Board Fire Sam Altman - WTF!
In Wiser! #148: The surprising firing of Sam Altman from OpenAI, updates from Microsoft's Ignite event, advancements in AI-generated music by Google’s DeepMind, and other AI tech news.
w/Wiser! #148 - 19th Nov 2023
Hello Wiserers, (or do you prefer Wiseristas?)
BREAKING NEWS: As I was finalising this week’s newsletter, the story broke that OpenAI had sacked Sam Altman. Say what?!
This was followed a few hours later by the departure of fellow co-founder and current Chairman, Greg Brockman. Nobody saw this coming and it caught tech journalists just as flat footed as the UK press earlier this week with the Bobby Ewing-like return of David Cameron to British politics.
In a short blog from OpenAI, they said that after a board review, they had found Altman was “not consistently candid in his communications” with the directors and they no longer had confidence in his ability to lead the company. Here’s an excerpt:
“OpenAI was deliberately structured to advance our mission: to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all humanity. The board remains fully committed to serving this mission. We are grateful for Sam’s many contributions to the founding and growth of OpenAI. At the same time, we believe new leadership is necessary as we move forward. As the leader of the company’s research, product, and safety functions, Mira is exceptionally qualified to step into the role of interim CEO. We have the utmost confidence in her ability to lead OpenAI during this transition period.”
It’s unclear what all this actually means and why the board didn’t think Altman was the right man to lead OpenAI on it’s vision. But you won’t be surprised that it’s kicked off a flurry of speculation and rumours as to why.
What’s crystal clear is that both Altman and Brockman were blindsided by the news. They have subsequently expressed shock and sadness without answering the question of “why?” Brockman went onto Twitter to explain how it happened. And Altman tweeted a short good-to-have-known-you message. But nether have offered any explanations, yet!
It’s also clear that Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest partner, didn’t know until minutes before Altman was told. Remember it was only a week ago that Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella was sharing a stage with Altman at the OpenAI developer’s day!
So, WTF!
→ Here’s The Thing: Sam Altman can take a huge slice of credit for creating this company now valued at $90 billion based on about $2 billion of annual revenues!
It’s the leader in generative AI and the most widely used. Just three days ago, OpenAI stopped taking new ChatGPT Plus subscriptions because of the massive surge in demand following last week’s GPT announcement. OpenAI has set the pace in the AI gold rush and are leading the pack.
Altman is seen as one of the good guys in tech. He has a reputation as a good boss, is very well connected in Silicon Valley and considered super smart. In 2009, Altman was named alongside Steve Jobs as one of “the five most influential startup founders of the previous 30 years” in an article called “Five Founders” by Paul Graham, the founder of Y-Combinator.
It is Altman’s reputation, connections and likability that attracts some of the best talent in AI to work for him, another notable factor in OpenAI’s success. Whether OpenAI has enough kudos to continue to be the home of the best talent will now be tested, especially since you can be sure that Altman will pop up somewhere else pretty soon.
So, it remains a mystery. Maybe this is down to the complicated structure of OpenAI, which has a non-profit board running a for-profit company (that’s not normal.) Or maybe it’s connected with Altman's involvement in external projects, like WorldCoin. Or some conflict of interest, as yet to be undisclosed. Or personal scandal, vendetta or just a bad day at the office.
Who knows? For now the exact reasons for the loss of confidence in Altman remains unclear and baffling. More to come…
w/News
What Happened In AI This Week?
Microsoft Held “Ignite” - The Annual Show & Tell That Was All About AI
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has emphatically stated that the company is “all-in on AI”, and Ignite 2023 served as a testament to that. The event saw updates ranging from the rebranding of its ChatGPT competitor, Bing Chat, to the much-awaited unveiling of custom AI chips to rival Nvidia, and methods to generate text-to-speech avatars. The highlights:
Bing Chat has been revamped as Copilot, the collective designation for all of Microsoft’s AI products and features. Originally integrated into the Edge browser as an alternative to ChatGPT, Bing Chat was the reason behind my switch to using Edge across my devices. However, I stopped using it because it wasn’t very good, so maybe I wasn’t alone in thinking it needed a restart.
Microsoft Teams' has a new “decorate your background” feature that might save you from ever having to tidy up your home office again. This video calling feature can automatically declutter your space and add plants or decorations to your background.
Microsoft also introduced an AI-powered noise reduction feature for Teams that can minimise repetitive background noise and other people’s voices.
Microsoft is streamlining its project management tools for a more intuitive user experience. The company is consolidating its suite of planning tools (Microsoft To Do, Microsoft Planner and Microsoft Project) into a single product, which will also incorporate AI functionalities with embedded Copilot features.
Customers could be shielded and compensated for any “adverse judgements” if they’re sued for copyright infringement resulting from the use of Azure’s OpenAI Service.
In a move to promote the use of generative AI experiences on Windows devices, Microsoft launched Windows AI Studio. The toolkit lets users run generative AI models on their own desktops instead of on the cloud.
Microsoft unveiled a tool capable of creating a deepfake. The Azure AI Speech text-to-speech avatar can generate a photorealistic avatar of a person and animate that avatar to speak words the person may not have said. Microsoft acknowledges the potential misuse of this tool and has imposed restrictions on its use. 🤦♂️
Finally, Microsoft gave details on their own custom AI computer chips. This move will allow Microsoft to become less dependent on GPU manufacturers like NVIDIA.
Videos and Keynotes: Microsoft Ignite Website
Google’s DeepMind On The Future Of AI Generated Music
DeepMind has been working on music synthesis for a number of years and now just announced a powerful new system. Interestingly, much of the boost came from a data partnership with revenue sharing. Meaning it trained on artists’ music for a better performing model while ensuring that the artists were compensated. The model will be available in a number of forms, one of which is via YouTube Shorts Studio. Source: DeepMind Blog
Meta’s Image AI Called Emu Fixes The Issue Of Editing AI Generated Images
One of the biggest irritates/limitations with generating an image with generative AI is that if it isn’t quite, getting the AI to tweak it is damn near impossible. The only way is to to adjust the prompt, but then the AI model creates a whole new image, when all you really want it to work on the first image it created. So, Meta have announced a new feature in Emu, their image generation model, that allows users to tweak AI generated images without creating a new one. Source: Meta Blog
Five Snippets Of Tech News
Google DeepMind released an AI that delivers 10-day weather forecasts with unprecedented accuracy and speed. The AI beat state-of-the-art systems roughly 90% of the time.
Notion has unveiled what it describes as the next chapter in AI. Q&A is a new feature from the company which allows users to get answers about any document in a workspace through a conversational UI.
Samsung has announced its generative AI model called Samsung Gauss, which consists of Language, Code, and Image models.
Warner Music is using AI technology to create a biopic about the late singer Edith Piaf, training the AI on voice clips and images to revive her.
Meta will now require political advertisers to disclose AI content.
FREE TO WISER! READERS: If you’re new to generative AI and want to know the basics of how to get started, what you can do with AI and sample prompts to get you going…download your copy of The Beginner’s Guide To ChatGPT for FREE!
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