I’m here in New York at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit, an annual gathering of some of the most powerful people in the world.
Over the course of the day we’ll be hearing from people like Bob Iger, David Zaslav, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and FTC chair Lina Khan — and we’ll close out the day with an interview with Elon Musk. Check back in for news as the day goes on.
At re:Invent 2023, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said the second generation of the company’s Trainium chip can train models four times faster than its predecessor. Trainium 2 has three times the memory as the first chip.
The co-founder of website builder Wix is embracing generative AI, and he’s not too worried that it might destroy the business models of the web.
The US, UK, and other major powers (notably excluding China) unveiled a 20-page document on Sunday that provides general recommendations for companies developing and/or deploying AI systems, including monitoring for abuse, protecting data from tampering, and vetting software suppliers.
The agreement warns that security shouldn’t be a “secondary consideration” regarding AI development, and instead encourages companies to make the technology “secure by design”.
When SAG-AFTRA finally reached a tentative agreement to bring the actors strike to an end earlier this month, the union’s insistence that its members might not be able to look over the deal before voting on it raised more than a few eyebrows.
It seemed odd that union leadership might try to get people on board with the contract without giving them a chance to read the whole thing. But now the union’s released the full document — on the Friday evening after Thanksgiving of all days.
[Twitter]
This Wall Street Journal article about the recent drama at OpenAI contains an amazing anecdote. Apparently an employee at AI rival Anthropic thought it’d be funny to send “thousands of paper clips in the shape of OpenAI’s logo” as a prank, in reference to the infamous paperclip maximizer thought experiment.
Weirdly, I think OpenAI’s logo makes for a great paperclip design. Should we be worried?
Reports from Reuters and The Information Wednesday night detail an OpenAI model called Q* (pronounced Q Star) that was recently demonstrated internally and is capable of solving simple math problems. Doing grade school math may not seem impressive, but the reports note that, according to the researchers involved, it could be a step toward creating artificial general intelligence (AGI).
After the publishing of the Reuters report, which said senior exec Mira Murati told employees that a letter about Q* “precipitated the board’s actions” to fire Sam Altman last week, OpenAI spokesperson Lindsey Held Bolton refuted that notion in a statement shared with The Verge: “Mira told employees what the media reports were about but she did not comment on the accuracy of the information.”
Separately, a person familiar with the matter told The Verge that the board never received a letter about such a breakthrough and that the company’s research progress didn’t play a role in Altman’s sudden firing.
The drama continues!
