The startup has appointed Zico Kolter, a professor and the director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, to its board of directors. Kolter will also join the Board’s Safety and Security Committee alongside a group of other board members and CEO Sam Altman.
Kolter has a background in developing safety methods for large language models and formerly worked as the Chief Data Scientist at C3.ai.
OpenAI is leading a $60 million funding round for Opal, the same company behind the high-end Tadpole webcam, according to a report from The Information.
While Opal will reportedly continue to sell its webcams, The Information reports that it’s also working on AI-enabled devices that people can use as “creative tools.”
[The Information]
The newspaper will file an amended complaint by August 12. If the Times wins its suit, adding those works means those two companies are on the hook for a minimum of $7.5 billion in statutory damages alone.
John Schulman is leaving to work on alignment at Anthropic, OpenAI’s chief rival. In a reply post on X, CEO Sam Altman thanked Schulman and said he “laid out a significant fraction of what became OpenAI’s initial strategy.”
In his new job, Schulman will work closely with Jan Leike, another senior leader who recently left OpenAI for Anthropic due to concerns that safety had taken a backseat to business priorities.
CNBC spotted the update this week in Microsoft’s risk factors with the SEC. These are managed by lawyers to help shield companies from shareholders lawsuits and generally pretty conservative. Still, the change feels like a sign of how OpenAI and its largest investor are drifting apart.
Relatedly, I couldn’t help but notice the number of times Microsoft execs mentioned OpenAI during their earnings call this week: zero.
I was once told that the only reason people are wowed by AI products like ChatGPT is because it mimics us, and we’re obsessed with ourselves. I think about that a lot, especially as I watched this video of ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode catching its non-existent breath as it counts quickly to 50. So strange.
Sam Altman announced that OpenAI is collaborating with the US AI Safety Institute for early access to their next foundation model (but no release date was specified.)
He also emphasized OpenAI’s commitment to dedicating 20% of computing resources to safety, a promise originally made to the now-defunct Superalignment team.
Plus, he noted that OpenAI has removed non-disparagement clauses for employees and provisions allowing the cancellation of vested equity.
