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Mr. Altman plans to launch the initiative with his longtime partner and co-founder Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s former president who stepped down in solidarity with Mr. Altman on Friday, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the plans for the new company are not yet public. Details on the potential company are scarce, because Mr. Altman and Mr. Brockman are still working through what it will be. Plans could change quickly, as the pair are keeping a wide range of options open, the sources said. OpenAI’s board of directors shocked the tech industry on Friday when it abruptly fired Mr. Altman from his position as chief executive. By Friday night, the two men were already working on their plans to pitch investors on their next venture.

Persons: Sam Altman, Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s, Brockman Organizations: OpenAI

Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, two top executives at OpenAI who left the company after a dramatic board meeting on Friday, are talking again with board members about returning to the artificial intelligence start-up, two people with knowledge of the matter said. The discussions follow an outcry after Mr. Altman, 38, was ousted from his role as OpenAI’s chief executive. Since then, OpenAI’s investors and Mr. Altman’s supporters have pressured the board members of the start-up to bring Mr. Altman back, six people with knowledge of the situation said. There is no guarantee that Mr. Altman or Mr. Brockman will be reinstated at OpenAI, the people said. work is done — the company’s investors have no official say in what happens to the start-up or who leads it.

Persons: Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Altman, Altman’s, Brockman Organizations: OpenAI, Microsoft Locations: OpenAI

Sitting beneath a palm tree on a cliff above the ocean at Mr. Benioff’s Hawaiian home in 2018, they explained both devices. “This one,” Mr. Benioff said, pointing at the Ai Pin, as dolphins breached the surf below, “is huge.”“It’s going to be a massive company,” he added. They experimented in secret with hardware components and built a virtual assistant, like Siri or Alexa, working with customized language models based, in part, on OpenAI’s offerings. The device’s most sci-fi element — the laser that projects a text menu onto a hand — started inside a box the size of a matchbook. It took three years to miniaturize it to be smaller than the size of a golf tee.

Persons: Mr, Benioff, “, ”, Siri, Altman Organizations: Apple

☆ Can A.I. and Lasers Cure Our Smartphone Addiction?
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-09 | by ( Erin Griffith | More About Erin Griffith | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Slowly, I circled my wrist to scroll, pressing an index finger and thumb together in a pinching motion to select an item. The gadget, called the Ai Pin, is a new take on wearable devices that aims to supplant, or at least help wean us off, our addiction to screens. It took a few seconds of waving my hand in front of my chest to find the laser menu. The circling wrist motion takes a second to nail as well. In 10 minutes of wearing the device at the company’s offices, I gradually learned how to hold the light and manipulate it.

Persons: ”

☆ Silicon Valley Shrugs Off Sam Bankman-Fried’s Trial
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-02 | by ( Erin Griffith | More About Erin Griffith | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In the four weeks that Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange, was on trial on fraud charges, the tech industry:Reacted to the war in Israel and Gaza, including protesting a tech conference organizer’s social media posts about the conflict. Buzzed over a manifesto from a top venture capitalist outlining a list of enemies to technological progress. Scrambled to invest money in the hottest artificial intelligence company, OpenAI, at triple its valuation earlier this year. Hotly debated the new features on Threads, a social media site owned by Meta. But a simpler answer could be that the tech industry has again done what it does best: move on to the next thing.

Persons: Sam Bankman, Bankman Organizations: Meta Locations: Israel, Gaza, FTX

And when Robert Van Winkle, better known as Vanilla Ice, sang his 1990 hit “Ice Ice Baby,” flanked by 10-foot sparklers, he pulled the Sugar Ray frontman Mark McGrath onstage. This was Cameopalooza 2021, a company retreat celebrating the meteoric rise of Cameo, an app and website where regular people could buy personalized videos from minor celebrities for as little as $1. Three hundred Cameo employees danced, took videos and basked in their good fortune to be a part of the Cameo “Fameo” — the company’s nickname for its employees and community of celebrities. A former collegiate party promoter, he shared the lifestyle of Cameo’s celebrity talent, jet setting between parties, sporting events and luxury homes in Miami, Los Angeles, and Chicago. Cameo had just raised $100 million on the audacious ambition to pioneer the “connection economy,” landing a $1 billion “unicorn” valuation just a few years into its existence.

Persons: Kenny G, Paula Abdul, Hamilton, Lance Bass, Robert Van Winkle, Ray, Mark McGrath, Jack Harlow, Steven Galanis, Cameo Organizations: Chicago, Hilton Locations: American, partied, Miami , Los Angeles, Chicago

Initial public offerings are back, warts and all. After a two-year dearth of new listings, shares of the grocery delivery company Instacart closed their first day of trading on Tuesday at $33.70, up 12 percent from their initial public offering price of $30. The performance signaled that investors were eager to take a chance on young tech companies — but only at the right price. But even with the early stock price pop, the company’s valuation remained a far cry from the $39 billion that investors assigned it in the private market in 2021. “The markets will always ebb and flow,” she said, adding that she was more focused on what she could control.

Persons: Fidji Simo

Instacart on Monday priced its shares at $30 each for its initial public offering, at the top of its expected range, in a sign of renewed demand for tech stocks. The San Francisco-based grocery delivery company had estimated that its shares would be priced at $28 to $30 a share. Instacart raised $660 million in the offering and was valued at $9.9 billion, significantly below its last private fund-raising round in 2021, which valued the company at $39 billion. Many companies that raised money during the boom times of 2020 and 2021 have slashed their soaring valuations over the last year. Before last week, this had been the worst year for I.P.O.s since 2009, according to EquityZen, a marketplace for private stocks.

Persons: Instacart Organizations: Nasdaq, I.P.O.s Locations: San Francisco

When Fidji Simo took over as chief executive of Instacart in 2021, the grocery delivery start-up’s growth was cratering as its pandemic boom ebbed. Ms. Simo, a former executive at Meta with experience in advertising, played to her strengths. She also hatched a plan to sell software tools and other products to grocery companies to help improve shopping experiences, they said. Then she embarked on a good-will tour to visit the grocery companies and hosted their executives at her home in Carmel, Calif.As Instacart prepares to go public next week, it is a markedly different company. Envisioned in 2012 as a service that matched people at home with contract workers who would shop for them and deliver groceries, it has increasingly focused on advertising and software products as its delivery business has slowed.

Persons: Fidji Simo, Simo, Brands, Instacart Organizations: Meta Locations: Carmel , Calif

☆ The Stock Market Hopes for a Hit From the Year’s Biggest Initial Public Offering
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-14 | by ( Erin Griffith | More About Erin Griffith | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

When shares of Arm, the British chip designer, begin trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday in the year’s biggest initial public offering, investors, tech executives, bankers and start-up founders will be watching closely for how it performs. If Arm’s stock falls, they will know that the market for I.P.O.s is likely to stay frozen for longer. But a warm welcome for the shares could entice many more companies to go public in the coming months, ending the cold streak. Arm is the largest company to brave the public markets in 2023, a year that has been almost deathly quiet for I.P.O.s. The chip designer, which is owned by SoftBank, priced its offering on Wednesday at $51 a share, raising $4.87 billion and valuing the company at $54.5 billion.

Persons: ”, David Hsu Organizations: Nasdaq, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, SoftBank Locations: British

What if you built a new city from the ground up? Mr. Sramek, a former Goldman Sachs trader, had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to make it in tech. He was a European immigrant smitten with the energy of local start-ups, but he preferred more walkable cities like Zurich. Soon, he began taking fishing trips to Solano County on the San Francisco Bay’s eastern edge. A rural corner of the county eventually became the centerpiece of a plan hatched by Mr. Sramek to build a city from scratch.

Persons: Jan Sramek, Sramek, Goldman Sachs, Flannery Organizations: San, San Francisco Bay Area, Flannery Associates Locations: San Francisco Bay, European, Zurich, Solano County, San Francisco, Silicon Valley

In 2017, Michael Moritz, the billionaire venture capitalist, sent a note to a potential investor about what he described as an unusual opportunity: a chance to invest in the creation of a new California city. The site was in a corner of the San Francisco Bay Area where land was cheap. He painted a kind of urban blank slate where everything from design to construction methods and new forms of governance could be rethought. And it would all be a short distance from San Francisco and Silicon Valley. “Let me know if this tickles your fancy,” he said in the note, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Persons: Michael Moritz, Moritz Organizations: The New York Times Locations: California, San Francisco Bay, Paris, New York, San Francisco, Silicon Valley

☆ The Desperate Hunt for the A.I. Boom’s Most Indispensable Prize
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-16 | by ( Erin Griffith | More About Erin Griffith | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In particular, Mr. Paoli needs a type of chip known as a graphics processing unit, or GPU, because it is the fastest and most efficient way to run the calculations that allow cutting-edge A.I. He’s tried making Docugami’s A.I. “I think about it as a rare earth metal at this point,” Mr. Paoli said of the chips. More than money, engineering talent, hype or even profits, tech companies this year are desperate for GPUs. The hunt for the essential component was kicked off last year when online chatbots like ChatGPT set off a wave of excitement over A.I., leading the entire tech industry to pile on and creating a shortage of the chips.

Persons: Jean Paoli, Paoli, he’s, He’s, Mr

☆ A Zoom Call, Fake Names and an A.I. Presentation Gone Awry
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-07 | by ( Erin Griffith | More About Erin Griffith | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Arthur AI, an artificial intelligence company in New York, received a message in April last year from a start-up called OneOneThree. Yan Fung, OneOneThree’s head of technology, said he was interested in buying Arthur AI’s technology and wanted a demonstration. An Arthur AI employee recognized the name as belonging to a founder of Arize AI, a rival start-up. “That’s so strange — I don’t know how they could have possibly gotten the link,” the Arthur AI employee said. The new attendee quickly logged off, and Mr. Fung said he did not know Ms. Dhinakaran.

Persons: Arthur AI, Yan Fung, Arthur AI’s, Fung, Fung’s, Arthur, Karina Patel, Aparna Dhinakaran, “, Dhinakaran, ArizeAI, Dat Ngo, OneOneThree Organizations: The New York Times, Arthur AI Locations: New York

As the FTX cryptocurrency exchange imploded last fall, Tom Brady, the seven-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback, made an urgent phone call. Mr. Nader couldn’t answer. “I never would’ve expected to decline a call from Tom Brady,” he said. Mr. Brady had reasons to be concerned. Mr. Brady’s wife at the time, the supermodel Gisele Bündchen, was paid $18 million in FTX stock, one of the people said.

Persons: Tom Brady, Sina Nader, FTX’s, Sam Bankman, Mr, Nader couldn’t, “, ”, Brady, FTX, Brady’s, Gisele Bündchen Organizations: FTX Locations: Bahamas

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