Artificial Intelligence

I’m at The New York Times DealBook Summit, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently got off stage with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Some highlights:

- He doesn’t think Elon Musk will wield his new political power against business rivals: “It would go so deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself.”

- His disagreement with my view that OpenAI and Microsoft are in the process of breaking up: “I don’t think we’re disentangling.”

You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

Google DeepMind researchers say their machine learning model “better predicts extreme weather, tropical cyclone tracks and wind power production” in a paper published today in the journal Nature.

“It’s a big deal,” Kerry Emanuel, a professor emeritus of atmospheric science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tells the New York Times.

Kate Rouch, the former CMO of Coinbase, has been hired by OpenAI to lead its marketing efforts, Ad Age reported.

OpenAI has been padding out its c-suite this year: It hired Sarah Friar as chief financial officer, Kevin Weil as chief business officer, Scott Schools as chief compliance officer, and Aaron Chatterji as its chief economist. Notably, they haven’t hired a CTO to replace Mira Murati, who recently departed.

In an interview with the Financial Times, OpenAI’s new CFO Sarah Friar said that the startup was considering an ads model and it planned to be “thoughtful about when and where we implement” ads.

In a statement following the interview, though, Friar added:

“While we’re open to exploring other revenue streams in the future, we have no active plans to pursue advertising.”

According to The Information, the retail giant might be unveiling its flagship LLM at its AWS re:Invent conference next week. The AI model can reportedly analyze images and videos and find specific scenes via text prompts, such as a winning basketball shot.

The AI should help Amazon reduce its dependency on Anthropic’s Claude, after pouring $8 billion into the startup.

Today, a Hugging Face employee published data from 1 million Bluesky posts scraped from its API to the AI repository. He’s removed it and apologized, but 404 Media notes the set was “trending” all day.

Bluesky says it’s looking into ways to “specify consent (or not) for AI training.” but acknowledges that “It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings.”

The era of the LLM means you now have to figure out whether you are talking to another person — or just some bot. There’s one sci-fi author who focused on just that.

Bloomberg explores Amazon’s $8 billion partnership with Anthropic that could advance Amazon’s Trainium hardware and software tools enough for the AWS provider to cut into Nvidia’s stranglehold on the $100-billion-plus market for AI chips:

Trainium2 is the company’s third generation of artificial intelligence chip. By industry reckoning, this is a make-or-break moment. Either the third attempt sells in sufficient volume to make the investment worthwhile, or it flops and the company finds a new path.

A federal judge denied OpenAI’s bid to force The New York Times to reveal how its reporters use AI tools, ruling that the discovery request was overly broad. The ruling’s final metaphor gives you a hint of how silly the judge found the whole thing:

“If a copyright holder sued a video game manufacturer for copyright infringement ... the video game manufacturer would not be entitled to wide-ranging discovery concerning the copyright holder’s employees’ gaming history.”