Senior AI Reporter
Kylie Robison is a Senior AI Reporter for The Verge, working closely with The Verge’s policy and tech teams. She joined The Verge from Fortune, where she extensively covered the inner-workings of Elon Musk’s X with scoops on its plans to begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features, its plans to remove headlines from news articles, a chaotic internal all-hands after the platform sued Media Matters, and more. She authored the magazine’s cover story on OpenAI and has also profiled buzzy AI startups like Runway. She lives in San Francisco with her cat, who regularly appears in the background of her meetings. She spends her free time snowboarding, traveling, and playing games on her Nintendo Switch.
You can reach her on Signal: @kylie.01
Ethics statement, May 2024: Kylie's parent is employed by GitHub. She therefore does not currently report or edit stories about GitHub products or GitHub as a company.
OpenAI just announced an alpha program for a new tool (called reinforcement fine-tuning) that lets developers train models on specific tasks, using example problems and answers. In a post after the livestream announcement, CEO Sam Altman said this will make it “really easy to create expert models in specific domains with very little training data.”
A new Llama 3.3 70B model dropped today, and Meta’s VP of genAI said it matches the performance of the larger 405B version, but runs cheaper and lighter. They also claimed this new model beats competitors Google, OpenAI, and Amazon on key tests like MMLU.
Competitors also really love overlapping their AI announcements — Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and xAI have all dropped announcements this week.
Today has been a busy day. I was working on some OpenAI news — but Mother Nature doesn’t care about my plans!
There was a 7.0 earthquake, and now there are tsunami warnings here in San Francisco. Interestingly, though, Google Docs and Drive both warned me about the Tsunami (sometimes it shows a button for “More Info” and sometimes not).
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.
[Ad Age]
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.”
[Financial Times]