Alongside its big funding round that could include investments from Apple and Nvidia, OpenAI may also change its structure “so that it is more appealing to investors,” The New York Times reports. OpenAI is a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary.
The NYT also says OpenAI has elevated Chris Lehane, who worked at Airbnb and in the Clinton administration, to be its VP of global policy.
Why is OpenAI paying publishers if it already took their work?
She’ll be speaking to them as part of an ABC special, titled “AI and the Future of Us,” that will debut on September 12th at 8ET and be available on Hulu the next day, TheWrap reports.
OpenAI announced it’s partnering with Condé Nast, which owns publications like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Wired. OpenAI will display Condé Nast’s content in its new AI-powered search engine prototype, SearchGPT (but provided no details on if it’s using Condé’s content as training data).
These media/AI company deals are becoming more common because media execs seem to believe that accepting the money, rather than laying off staff to afford lengthy legal battles, is the best option for now. (Also, Vox Media has a partnership with OpenAI.)
[OpenAI]
The company closed the waitlist for its “prototype” generative search product, sending out emails like the one below to signed-up users who weren’t chosen to test it.
The company has said only 10,000 users will get access at first, which could help it if its searchbot gives bad recommendations like gluing slippery cheese to pizza.
Here’s what Eric Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2004 to 2011 and then chairman until 2015, had to say recently during a talk at Stanford:
Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the reason startups work is because people work like hell.
Update, August 14th: It appears that Schmidt didn’t intend for his comments to make headlines! Stanford has taken the video of his talk down, so here’s a clip that is still online:
For more of the backstory and ambition behind Worldcoin, the eyeball-scanning-for-cryptocurrency startup that Sam Altman thinks could one day save us all from an AI-controlled world, check out this piece from Bloomberg’s Ashley Vance:
Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they’ve already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.
