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☆ Phillips 66 Is Accused of Violating the Clean Water Act
▼ + stars: | 2024-11-21 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

A federal grand jury on Wednesday indicted Phillips 66 on charges of violating the Clean Water Act by dumping nearly 800,000 gallons of contaminated wastewater into the Los Angeles County sewer system and failing to report the incident to authorities. The Houston-based oil company was charged with releasing wastewater that contained excessive amounts of oil and grease from a refinery in Carson, Calif., in 2020 and 2021, the Justice Department said Thursday. “Protecting our environment is key to protecting our community,” Martin Estrada, the U.S. attorney for the Central District of California, said in a statement. “Just like the rest of us, corporations have a duty to follow the law, so when companies contaminate, they must be held accountable.”The Justice Department charged Phillips 66 with two counts of negligently violating the Clean Water Act and four counts of knowingly violating the act. The company faces up to five years of probation on each count and a maximum of $2.4 million in fines.

Persons: Phillips, ” Martin Estrada, “ Organizations: Justice Department, Central, Central District of Locations: Angeles, Houston, Carson , Calif, U.S, Central District, Central District of California

☆ Elon Musk Withdraws His Lawsuit Against OpenAI and Sam Altman
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-11 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

Elon Musk withdrew his lawsuit on Tuesday against OpenAI, the maker of the online chatbot ChatGPT, a day before a state judge in San Francisco was set to consider whether it should be dismissed. The suit, filed in February, had accused the artificial intelligence start-up and two of its founders, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, of breaching OpenAI’s founding contract by prioritizing commercial interests over the public good. A multibillion-dollar partnership that OpenAI signed with Microsoft, Mr. Musk’s suit claimed, represented an abandonment of the company’s pledge to carefully develop A.I. and make the technology publicly available. Mr. Musk had argued that the founding contract said that the organization should instead be focused on building artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., a machine that can do anything the brain can do, for the benefit of humanity.

Persons: Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, OpenAI, Musk’s, Musk Organizations: OpenAI, Microsoft Locations: San Francisco

☆ Judge Blocks New U.S. Rule Limiting Credit Card Late Fees
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-10 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: 1 min

In March, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced that a new federal rule would cap fees on late credit card payments at $8 a month, estimating that the change would save American households $10 billion a year. On Friday, a federal judge in Fort Worth temporarily blocked the rule, siding with bank and credit card company lobbyists who contend in a lawsuit that it is unconstitutional. Now, the lobbyists can continue their legal fight in U.S. District Court before Judge Mark T. Pittman, who granted the preliminary injunction. The consumer bureau’s new rule would limit issuers to an $8 fee unless they could show that more money was needed to cover their collection costs. The bureau estimated that the rule would apply to more than 95 percent of all outstanding credit card balances.

Persons: Mark T, Pittman Organizations: Consumer Financial, Bureau Locations: Fort Worth, U.S

☆ Google Unveils A.I. for Predicting Behavior of Human Molecules
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-08 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation. It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease. An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called “the protein folding problem.”Proteins are the microscopic molecules that drive the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as strings of chemical compounds before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body.

Organizations: Google

As experts warn that images, audio and video generated by artificial intelligence could influence the fall elections, OpenAI is releasing a tool designed to detect content created by its own popular image generator, DALL-E. start-up acknowledges that this tool is only a small part of what will be needed to fight so-called deepfakes in the months and years to come. On Tuesday, OpenAI said it would share its new deepfake detector with a small group of disinformation researchers so they could test the tool in real-world situations and help pinpoint ways it could be improved. “This is to kick-start new research,” said Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy. “That is really needed.”

Persons: OpenAI, ”, Sandhini Agarwal

is an investigative reporter at The Times, writing about public corruption. He has been covering the various criminal investigations into former President Trump and his allies.

Persons: Trump Organizations: The Times

☆ Computer Theorist Wins $1 Million Turing Award
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-11 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest society of computing professionals, announced that this year’s Turing Award will go to Avi Wigderson, an Israeli-born mathematician and theoretical computer scientist who specializes in randomness. Often called the Nobel Prize of computing, the Turing Award comes with a $1 million prize. The award is named for Alan Turing, the British mathematician who helped create the foundations for modern computing in the mid-20th century. Other recent winners include Ed Catmull and Pat Hanrahan, who helped create the computer-generated imagery, or C.G.I., that drives modern movies and television, and the A.I. researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun and Yoshua Bengio, who nurtured the techniques that gave rise to chatbots like ChatGPT.

Persons: Turing, Avi Wigderson, Alan Turing, Ed Catmull, Pat Hanrahan, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio Organizations: Association for Computing Machinery Locations: Israeli, British

Microsoft filed a motion in federal court on Monday that seeks to dismiss parts of a lawsuit brought by The New York Times Company. The Times sued Microsoft and its partner OpenAI on Dec. 27, accusing the two companies of infringing on its copyrights by using its articles to train A.I. In its motion, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Microsoft argued that large language models, or L.L.M.s — the technologies that drive chatbots — did not supplant the market for news articles and other materials they were trained on. The tech giant compared L.L.M.s to videocassette recorders, arguing that both are allowed under the law. than it was to the VCR (or the player piano, copy machine, personal computer, internet or search engine),” the motion read.

Persons: OpenAI Organizations: Microsoft, The New York Times Company, The Times, Southern, of Locations: U.S, of New York

☆ A.I. Start-Up Anthropic Challenges OpenAI and Google With New Chatbot
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-04 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

start-up Anthropic released a new version of its Claude chatbot on Monday, saying it outperforms other leading chatbots on a range of standard benchmark tests, including systems from Google and OpenAI. Dario Amodei, Anthropic’s chief executive and co-founder, said the new technology, called Claude 3 Opus, was particularly useful when analyzing scientific data or generating computer code. Anthropic is among a small group of companies at the forefront of generative A.I., technology that instantly creates text, images and sounds. Dr. Amodei and other Anthropic founders helped pioneer the technology while working as researchers at OpenAI, the start-up that launched the generative A.I. Chatbots like ChatGPT can answer questions, write term papers, generate small computer programs and more.

Persons: Anthropic, Claude chatbot, Dario Amodei, Claude, Opus, Amodei Organizations: Google, OpenAI

OpenAI has completed a deal that values the San Francisco artificial intelligence company at $80 billion or more, nearly tripling its valuation in less than 10 months, according to three people with knowledge of the deal. The company would sell existing shares in a so-called tender offer led by the venture firm Thrive Capital, the people said. The deal lets employees cash out their shares in the company, rather than a traditional funding round that would raise money for business operations. The deal is another example of the Silicon Valley deal-making machine pumping money into a handful of companies that specialize in generative A.I. The funding boom kicked off early last year, after OpenAI captured the public’s imagination with the release of the online chatbot ChatGPT.

Persons: OpenAI Organizations: SpaceX Locations: San Francisco

Page, hampered for more than a decade by an unusual ailment in his vocal cords, described his vision of a digital utopia in a whisper. If that happens, Mr. Musk said, we’re doomed. Finally he called Mr. Musk a “specieist,” a person who favors humans over the digital life-forms of the future. That debate has pitted some of the world’s richest men against one another: Mr. Musk, Mr. Page, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, the tech investor Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Sam Altman of OpenAI.

Persons: Page, Musk, we’re, ”, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, OpenAI Organizations: Valley, Meta, Microsoft Locations: Silicon

In a blog post, Mr. Altman, who was rapidly reinstated last week, also outlined his priorities for OpenAI as he retakes the reins of the high-profile artificial intelligence start-up. He added that its board would focus on improving governance and overseeing an independent review of the events that led to and followed his removal as chief executive. Microsoft expands a three-person board that OpenAI announced last week. Microsoft will be able to participate in OpenAI’s board meetings but not vote on business decisions. “Part of what good governance means is that there’s more predictability, transparency and input from various stakeholders, and this seemed like a good way to get that from a very important one,” Mr. Altman said in an interview, referring to Microsoft.

Persons: OpenAI, Sam Altman, Altman, Mr Organizations: Microsoft

More board members, who could be plucked from OpenAI’s biggest investor, Microsoft, and the A.I. Mr. Altman was not named to the board on Tuesday night, and it was not clear if he ever will be. But some already argue that it will not be as attuned to OpenAI’s original mission to create A.I. The tech industry — perhaps even the world — will be watching to see if OpenAI is any closer to balancing those dueling aspirations than it was a week ago. “This needs to be a trustworthy organization that’s aligned with its board, and at the end of it all, OpenAI is a more valuable organization than it was a week ago.”

Persons: Altman, ”, Aaron Levie Organizations: Microsoft

For much of the past year, OpenAI’s board of directors has been criticized as too small and too divided to effectively govern one of the fastest-growing start-ups in Silicon Valley history. On Friday, the board’s dysfunction spilled into public view when four of its members fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s popular and powerful chief executive. Mr. Altman, 38, returned to the company on Tuesday night, after days of haggling over his job and over the makeup of the board. The board and Mr. Altman’s allies discussed more than a half dozen options for its future. The departing board wanted to be sure the replacements would be independent thinkers and experienced enough to stand up to Mr. Altman.

Persons: Sam Altman, OpenAI’s, Altman, Altman’s, Laurene Powell Jobs, Steve Jobs, Brian Chesky Organizations: Emerson Locations: Silicon Valley

Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, the company said, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors. The board of directors will be overhauled, jettisoning several members who had opposed Mr. Altman. Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, will be the only holdover. “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.

Persons: Sam Altman, Altman, Adam D’Angelo, Sam, Bret Taylor, Larry Summers, ” OpenAI, Greg Brockman, upended Organizations: Quora

Nearly all of OpenAI’s 800 employees have threatened to follow Mr. Altman to Microsoft, which asked him to lead an A.I. lab with Greg Brockman, who quit his roles as OpenAI’s president and board chairman in solidarity with Mr. Altman. The board has not said what it thought Mr. Altman was not being honest about. There were indications that the board was still open to his return, as it and Mr. Altman held discussions that extended into Tuesday, two people familiar with the talks said. But there was a sticking point: Mr. Altman rejected some of the guardrails that had been proposed to improve his communication with the board.

Persons: OpenAI, Altman, Greg Brockman, Brockman Organizations: Microsoft

OpenAI’s four-person board shocked the tech industry early Friday afternoon when it removed Mr. Altman, saying they could no longer trust him. One of the board members who pushed out Mr. Altman then reversed course on Monday and signed the letter demanding that he be reinstated. The decision by the board set off a frantic weekend of unexpected corporate jockeying that ended with Mr. Altman joining Microsoft to start a new A.I. By early Monday morning, the 700 employees had signed the letter, according to three people familiar with the matter. The upheaval leaves the future of one of the fastest-growing companies in Silicon Valley history in doubt.

Persons: Sam Altman, Altman Organizations: Microsoft, Mr Locations: Silicon Valley

The board of directors of OpenAI, the high-flying artificial intelligence start-up, said in a note to employees on Sunday night that its former chief, Sam Altman, would not be returning to his job, while naming his second interim replacement in two days. Emmett Shear, the former chief executive of Twitch, will replace Mira Murati as interim chief executive of OpenAI, the board said. Ms. Murati, a longtime OpenAI executive, had been appointed to that role after Mr. Altman’s ouster on Friday. The board said Mr. Shear has a “unique mix of skills, expertise and relationships that will drive OpenAI forward,” according to the memo viewed by The New York Times. It was signed by each of the four directors on the company’s board; Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, Ilya Sutskever, and Tasha McCauley.

Persons: Sam Altman, Emmett Shear, Twitch, Mira Murati, Murati, Altman’s, Shear, ”, Adam D’Angelo, Helen Toner, Ilya Sutskever, Tasha McCauley, “ Organizations: OpenAI, The New York Times

Talks at OpenAI to bring back Sam Altman, the artificial intelligence start-up’s recently ousted chief executive, continued on Sunday afternoon but there were disagreements over the makeup of the company’s board of directors, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Altman, 38, spent the weekend waging a pressure campaign on the start-up’s four-person board of directors who ousted him on Friday afternoon, three people familiar with the matter said. The result was a groundswell of support from investors, employees and OpenAI executives. Mr. Altman was at the OpenAI headquarters on Sunday afternoon. Members of the board have not yet agreed to what a restructured board of directors might look like — nor is Mr. Altman’s reinstatement an inevitability, two of the people said.

Persons: Sam Altman, up’s, Altman, “

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

☆ The Fear and Tension That Led to Sam Altman’s Ouster at OpenAI
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-18 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Over the last year, Sam Altman led OpenAI to the adult table of the technology industry. safety came into focus on Friday afternoon, when Mr. Altman was pushed out of his job by four of OpenAI’s six board members, led by Mr. Sutskever. The move shocked OpenAI employees and the rest of the tech industry, including Microsoft, which has invested $13 billion in the company. The ouster of Mr. Altman, 38, drew attention to a longtime rift in the A.I. And the ouster showed how a philosophical movement devoted to the fear of A.I.

Persons: Sam Altman, OpenAI, Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Sutskever, Steve Jobs, Mr Organizations: Microsoft, Apple Locations: San Francisco

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

☆ OpenAI’s Board Pushes Out Sam Altman, Its High-Profile C.E.O.
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-17 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Sam Altman, the high-profile chief executive of OpenAI, who became the face of the tech industry’s artificial intelligence boom, has been pushed out of the company by its board of directors, OpenAI said in a blog post on Friday afternoon. Mira Murati, who previously served as the company’s chief technology officer, has been named interim chief executive officer, the company said. 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. “The board no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.”The move is a stunning fall for Mr. Altman, 38, who over the last year had become one of the tech industry’s most prominent executives as well as one of its most fascinating characters. Last fall, OpenAI launched an industrywide A.I.

Persons: Sam Altman, OpenAI, Mira Murati, “ Mr, Altman Organizations: Mr

☆ OpenAI Lets Mom-and-Pop Shops Customize ChatGPT
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-06 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

OpenAI said on Monday that it had created a service that allows individuals and small businesses to build customized versions of its popular online chatbot, ChatGPT, and instantly share them on the internet. Through a new service called GPTs, anyone can quickly customize the chatbot for a particular task without help from additional software or computer code. The owner of a small bed-and-breakfast, for instance, could build a chatbot that answers questions for anyone who stays there. OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, has accelerated the release of its A.I. In September, it folded its DALL-E image generator into ChatGPT and released a new version of its popular chatbot that interacts with people using spoken words, much like Apple’s Siri digital assistant.

Persons: OpenAI, ” Peter Deng, Siri Locations: San Francisco

☆ Chatbots May ‘Hallucinate’ More Often Than Many Realize
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-06 | by ( Cade Metz | More About Cade Metz | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

But most people were slow to realize that this new kind of chatbot often makes things up. When Google introduced a similar chatbot several weeks later, it spewed nonsense about the James Webb telescope. The next day, Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot offered up all sorts of bogus information about the Gap, Mexican nightlife and the singer Billie Eilish. Now a new start-up called Vectara, founded by former Google employees, is trying to figure out how often chatbots veer from the truth. The company’s research estimates that even in situations designed to prevent it from happening, chatbots invent information at least 3 percent of the time — and as high as 27 percent.

Persons: OpenAI, James Webb, Bing chatbot, Billie Eilish, ChatGPT Organizations: Google Locations: San Francisco, Manhattan

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