On Saturday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that investors were trying to bring Sam Altman back as CEO of OpenAI. Maybe you saw that headline and thought, Wait a minute . . . wasn’t he fired . . . one day earlier?
So why is it highly plausible that Altman could return to OpenAI as its CEO after a weekend off? As always, follow the money.
Venture capitalists have deftly branded themselves as company builders, humble stewards of money who are always just askin
OpenAI added a powerful new feature to their mega-popular ChatGPT last week. It’s called custom GPTs and it allows users to alter the way the AI chatbot works at a fundamental level. You can now tailor how it communicates and provide specific datasets it can pull from. But is this, as many AI proponents are already calling it, a genuine game changer for the world of generative AI? Or is this just another fun gimmick?
The rollout of custom GPTs arrives at a pivotal moment for
In Hollywood, big money is getting lost in translation.
Sure, the global entertainment business is synced up like never before. Marvel blockbusters captivate audiences in China. Korean directors score one coup after another in the U.S. Streaming development executives now scour foreign markets to bring home the next Squid Game, Lupin, and Money Heist. And Western entertainment companies are pouring money into so-called localization efforts to ensure the sun never sets on Spiderman.
It’s not your imagination: Airlines are piling on more fees and extra charges, driving up the cost of air travel. Across the industry, revenue from what’s known as ancillary sales—fees for selecting seats, checking bags, and buying food, to name a few—will reach a record $117.9 billion in 2023. That’s a 7.7% increase from pre-pandemic records, according to a recent study from airline consultancy firm IdeaWorks and B2B car rental company CarTrawler.
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The recent Biden White House Executive Order on AI addresses important questions. If it’s not implemented in a dynamic and flexible way, however, it runs the risk of impeding the kinds of dramatic improvements in both government and community participation that generative AI stands to offer.
Current bureaucratic procedures, developed 150 years ago, need reform, and generative AI presents a unique opportunity to do just that. As two lifelong public servants, we believe that th
It’s not just OpenAI.
The long-simmering fault lines within OpenAI over questions of safety with regard to the deployment of large language models like GPT, the engine behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT and DALL-E services, came to a head on Friday when the organization’s nonprofit board of directors voted to fire then-CEO Sam Altman. In a brief blog post, the board said that Altman had not been “consistently candid in his communications.” Now rumors are swir
On Tuesday, November 7, a handful of former staffers from the gaming culture site Kotaku announced that they were forming a similarly themed, worker-owned website called Aftermath. A few days later, G/O Media announced that it was shuttering Kotaku’s sister site, Jezebel, the trailblazing feminist blog that has been around since 2007, an eternity in internet years.
Sadly, this counts as a normal week for digital media these days—although the problems and solutions are
“I’ve known Sam for a long time.”
That was Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella last June, telling me the origin story of how his company came to strike an unorthodox deal with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to become the startup’s primary partner. We were chatting for a Fast Company’s cover story on Microsoft’s enviable position in AI: It was using OpenAI’s breakthroughs as the foundation for potentially transformative new features in products such as
Sam Altman, who has rapidly become a household name for his work on ChatGPT, was pushed out of OpenAI on Friday. But that doesn’t mean Altman is anywhere near out of the AI game: Reports are already emerging suggesting he’s got designs for a new venture.
Altman’s dismissal was a shocking move that’s likely going to have longterm repercussions for the company and the AI community at large. And it’s left many of us wondering what exactly happened.
There’s a theory going around about OpenAI’s mysterious firing of its high-profile CEO Sam Altman. In essence, the hypothesis is that Altman was pushing hard to commercialize OpenAI’s research without giving proper regard to managing the safety risks of the technology. But an internal memo from OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap to employees on Saturday seems to throw cold water on that idea.
“We can say definitively that the board’s decision was not made in