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☆ Sam Altman tells staff OpenAI investigation will 'soon' close, as employees brace for more surprises
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-05 | by ( Kali Hays | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Inside OpenAI, Sam Altman is still approachable and friendly to staff, even though many of them are realizing how little they know about how the company operates. Altman responded simply that it would be "over soon," supplying staff with no other detail, according to two people who witnessed the exchange. The internal investigation nearing its end was also reported by the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. Such a lack of candor with employees is a more recent development for Altman, one of the people familiar noted. Although OpenAI employees are paid well, many workers are increasingly concerned about how much risk they're assuming.

Persons: Sam Altman, Altman, Slack, OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy, Karpathy, Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI's, Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Jakub Pachoki, Kali Hays Organizations: Service, Wall Street, The New York Times, SEC, Fund, Street, Microsoft, OpenAI Locations: OpenAI, Karpathy, khays@insider.com

Last week, Musk sued OpenAI and co-founders Sam Altman and Greg Brockman for breach of contract and fiduciary duty. "It's certainly a good advertisement for the benefit of Elon Musk," Kevin O'Brien, partner at Ford O'Brien Landy LLP and former assistant U.S. attorney, told CNBC. In the suit, Musk's lawyers say they want OpenAI to return to its work as a research lab and no longer exist for the "financial benefit" of Microsoft. Musk's attorneys didn't respond to a request for comment. Musk has an AI company of his own, X.AI, which introduced a competing chatbot called Grok in November after two months of training.

Persons: Elon Musk, Tesla, Beata Zawrzel, Elon, Musk, OpenAI, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, It's, Kevin O'Brien, Ford O'Brien Landy, I'm, O'Brien, isn't, Shannon Capone Kirk, Ropes & Gray, Chris Ratliffe, Kirk, —, X.AI, He's, bigwigs, Andrej Karpathy, Kyle Kosic, OpenAI's, Jason Kwon, Kwon Organizations: Nurphoto, Microsoft, Elon, CNBC, Ropes &, Ropes & Gray LLP, Bloomberg House, Economic, Bloomberg, Getty, The New York Times, SEC, Tesla, X.AI, OpenAI Locations: Krakow, Poland, Davos, Switzerland, OpenAI

“We believe the claims in this suit may stem from Elon’s regrets about not being involved with the company today,” wrote OpenAI Chief Strategy Officer Jason Kwon in an internal memo on Friday that was viewed by CNBC. The next year, Musk gave nearly $20 million to OpenAI, which the attorneys reiterated was more than other backers. "We did not think either approach was right for the mission," Kwon wrote. Regarding OpenAI's transformation from an "open source foundation" to a multibillion-dollar for-profit company, Musk said, "I don't know, is this legal?" — CNBC's Lora Kolodny and Hayden Field contributed to this reportWATCH: Elon Musk lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman began a year ago

Persons: Elon Musk, Tesla, ”, Jason Kwon, Sam Altman, OpenAI, Altman, Musk, Greg Brockman, Kwon, they've, Andrej Karpathy, Karpathy, didn't, — CNBC's Lora Kolodny, Hayden Field, Elon Organizations: CNBC, Elon, Microsoft, Tesla, The New York Times, OpenAI Locations: OpenAI

☆ Twitter employees monitored Elon Musk's jet-tracking account to see when he'd be in the office
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-20 | by ( Grace Kay | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Twitter staff also took to watching a social-media account that tracks Musk's planes, according to a new book about the company. Musk's jet travels made Sweeney's jet-tracking account @Elonjet more active than ever. Musk also reached out directly to Sweeney about the jet-tracking account. AdvertisementSince then, the college student has set up an account on the site that posts Musk's flight data with a 24-hour delay. The college student also posts flight data associated with other celebrities, including Taylor Swift and Mark Zuckerberg.

Persons: —, Elon, Musk, Jack Sweeney —, Kurt Wagner, Wagner, Elon Musk, Sweeney, he'd, Lars Moravy, Andrej Karpathy, Parag Agrawal, Agrawal, Vijaya Gadde, Jack Dorsey, Alex Spiro, Dorsey, Taylor Swift, Mark Zuckerberg, Grimes Organizations: Service, Twitter, Bloomberg, Business, SpaceX, Tesla, Gulfstream, Super, University of Central, University of Central Florida Locations: San Francisco, Texas, California, University of Central Florida

As Open AI employees celebrated the return of CEO Sam Altman with a five-alarm office party , OpenAI software engineer Steven Heidel was busy publicly rebuffing overtures from Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff. Heidel was one of more than 700 OpenAI employees who's threatened exodus halted a would-be mutiny at one of Silicon Valley's most important AI companies. He was previously a scientist at Facebook AI Research and worked as a member of Google Brain under supervision of Prof. Geoffrey Hinton and Ilya Sutskever. Alec Radford: Radford was hired in 2016 from a small AI company he founded in his dorm room. Tao Xu : technical staff, worked on GPT4 and WhisperChristine McLeavey : technical staff, with contributions to music-related productsChristina Kim : technical staffChristopher Hesse : technical staffHeewoo Jun : technical staff, researchAlex Nichol : technical staff, researchWilliam Fedus: technical staff, researchIlge Akkaya: technical staff, researchVineet Kosaraju : technical staff, researchHenrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto : technical staffAditya Ramesh : technical staff, developed DALL-E and DALL-E 2Prafulla Dhariwal : research scientistHunter Lightman : technical staffHarrison Edwards : research scientistYura Burda : machine language researcherTyna Eloundou : technical staff, researchPamela Mishkin : researcherCasey Chu : researcherDavid Dohan : technical staff, researchAidan Clark : researcherRaul Puri : research scientistLeo Gao : technical staff, researchYang Song : technical staff, researchGiambattista ParascandoloTodor Markov : Machine learning researcherNick Ryder : technical staff

Persons: Sam Altman, Steven Heidel, Marc Benioff, Heidel, Altman, Mira Murati, Murati, Brad Lightcap, Lightcap, Jason Kwon, Kwon, Wojciech Zaremba, Geoffrey Hinton, Ilya Sutskever, Alec Radford, Radford, OpenAI, Peter Welinder, He's, Github Copilot, Anna Makanju, Andrej Karpathy, OpenAI's, Michael Petrov, Petrov, Greg [ Brockman, Miles Brundage, Brundage, John Schulman OpenAI, Srinivas Narayanan, Scott Grey, Grey, Bob McGrew, Research Che Chang, Lillian Weng, Safety Systems Mark Chen, Frontiers Research Barret Zoph, Peter Deng, Jan Leike Evan Morikawa Steven Heidel Jong Wook Kim, Tao Xu, Christine McLeavey, Christina Kim, Christopher Hesse, Heewoo, Alex Nichol, William Fedus, Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto, Aditya Ramesh, Hunter Lightman, Harrison Edwards, Yura, Tyna, Pamela Mishkin, Casey Chu, David Dohan, Aidan Clark, Raul Puri, Leo Gao, Yang, Giambattista Parascandolo Todor Markov, Nick Ryder Organizations: Business, BI, OpenAI, Khosla Ventures, Facebook, Research, Google, Tesla, U.S . Department of Energy, Oxford University, Safety Systems, Frontiers Research Locations: Albania, Canada, OpenAI

☆ Heart emojis, confusion, and a wave of support for Sam Altman. Here's what OpenAI employees are saying about Altman's shock ousting.
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-20 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

OpenAI employees are having a tough time after Sam Altman was suddenly ousted from the company. Here's what OpenAI employees are saying about the chaotic transition. Since Friday the company has cycled through three CEOs: cofounder Sam Altman, former CTO Mira Murati, and current CEO Emmett Shear, who cofounded Twitch. AdvertisementMore OpenAI staffers have threatened to join them unless Altman is reinstated and the board resigns. Throughout the night on Sunday, more OpenAI staffers spoke out, sharing the repeated message: "OpenAI is nothing without its people."

Persons: Sam Altman, Altman, —, Mira Murati, Emmett Shear, Greg Brockman, Aleksander Madry, Employees haven't, cofounders Brockman, Will Depue, Sam, Greg, Ilya Sutskever, Shengjia Zhao, Ilya, Jan Leike, Andrej Karpathy Organizations: Service, Microsoft, Employees, Business, Sutskever, OpenAI

☆ Founders and VCs are clamoring to get into this $68 million AI hacker house. Here's how the AGI House exploded into a community hub for the red-hot Bay Area AI scene.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-21 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +8 min

In February, the AGI House launched as a community hub for the buzzy Bay Area AI scene. Since launching in February this year, it's served as a hacker house and community hub for the Bay's exploding AI scene. Depending on the day, the residence houses between eight to ten AI founders and researchers, including a researcher from AI giant OpenAI. Stephanie PalazzoloFrom flying cars to fireside conversationsThe AGI House wasn't always the AGI House. "It's great to live in a community house where you're naturally connected to the AI founder community," she said.

Persons: Steve Jobs, Elon, it's, Demi Guo, Stephanie Palazzolo, wasn't, Andrej Karpathy, Rocky Yu, Karpathy, Sergey Brin, Kelly Peng, Yu, Jeremy Nixon, Tim Shi, Lerer Hippeau, Peng, Guo, There's, Greylock's, Corinne Riley AGI, they're Organizations: AGI, Technologies, Genesis, Foundation Capital Locations: buzzy, Hillsborough, Stanford, Alamo, LA, AGI, New York City, Stanford's

☆ Watch an A.I. Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but Jane Austen
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Aatish Bhatia | Aatish Bhatia Spent Weeks Reading Dozens Of A.I. Research Articles | Training Tiny Language Models On His Computer. Before Coming To The Times | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +12 min

This is how language models usually start off: They guess randomly and produce gibberish. Over many, many rounds of training, language models can learn to write. As language models grow larger, the patterns that they learn can become increasingly complex. More is differentOther than the additional fine-tuning stages, the primary difference between nanoGPT and the language model underlying chatGPT is size. Large language models can become highly unpredictable, as evidenced by Microsoft Bing A.I.’s early interactions with my colleague Kevin Roose.

To report this story, Reuters contacted more than 300 former Tesla employees who had worked at the company over the past nine years and were involved in developing its self-driving system. The company requires car owners to grant permission on the cars’ touchscreens before Tesla collects their vehicles’ data. Reuters found that Tesla employees shared clips that captured sensitive and embarrassing personal moments. Tesla’s own data labelers initially worked in the San Francisco Bay area, including the office in San Mateo. According to several ex-employees, some labelers shared screenshots, sometimes marked up using Adobe Photoshop, in private group chats on Mattermost, Tesla’s internal messaging system.

☆ Exclusive: Buzzy generative AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI taps NEA to lead funding round at a $150 million valuation
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-02 | by ( Stephanie Palazzolo | Ben Bergman | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +3 min

AI search engine startup Perplexity AI is raising a funding round led by NEA, Insider has learned. The deal aims to raise between $20 and $25 million at a $150 million post-money valuation, according to sources. The fundraise continues the trend of large rounds and valuations in the buzzy generative AI space. AI search engine startup Perplexity AI is in talks to raise a funding round led by NEA, according to three people with knowledge of the financing who were not authorized to speak publicly. Perplexity AI cofounder and CEO Aravind Srinivas declined to comment.

☆ 'Prompt engineering' is one of the hottest jobs in generative AI. Here's how it works.
▼ + stars: | 2023-03-01 | by ( Aaron Mok | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +6 min

Knowing how to talk to chatbots may get you hired as a prompt engineer for generative AI. Prompt engineers are experts in asking AI chatbots — which run on large language models — questions that can produce desired responses. Unlike traditional computer engineers who code, prompt engineers write prose to test AI systems for quirks; experts in generative AI told The Washington Post that this is required to develop and improve human-machine interaction models. Prompt engineering may not be 'the job of the future'Some academics question how effective prompt engineers really are in testing AI. Companies in a variety of industries are hiring prompt engineersThat isn't stopping companies across industries from hiring prompt engineers.

☆ Elon Musk's new Silicon Valley engineering headquarters will focus on AI, report says
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-23 | by ( Beatrice Nolan | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +2 min

Elon Musk's new California headquarters will focus on artificial intelligence, CNBC reported. The EV maker will focus on hiring engineers proficient in fields including artificial intelligence. On Wednesday, Elon Musk announced that Tesla was expanding its engineering headquarters in California, taking over office space in Palo Alto once occupied by Hewlett-Packard. The outlet reported that Tesla would focus on hiring engineers skilled in fields including artificial intelligence. In an interview with CNBC, California governor Gavin Newsom said all the "elite engineers" in the industry were based in the state.

☆ ChatGPT-maker OpenAI has hired tons of former Google and Meta employees, new data shows
▼ + stars: | 2023-02-22 | by ( Grace Kay | ) www.businessinsider.com time to read: +4 min

Last year, the company hired several Google staff to do "instrumental" work on ChatGPT. Data from LeadGenius and Punks & Pinstripes shows that a number of the company's 200-plus employees came from Alphabet, the parent company of Google and AI research lab DeepMind. OpenAI currently employs about 59 ex-Google employees and about 34 former Meta staff, according to the data. Data from Lead Genius and Punks & Pinstripes shows ex-Google staff make up a large portion of the company's staff. The Information previously reported that OpenAI hired several Google employees to do "instrumental" work on ChatGPT in the months leading up to its November launch.

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