ChatGPT, Bard, Claude. The world’s most popular and successful chatbots are trained on data scraped from vast swaths of the internet, mirroring the cultural and linguistic dominance of the English language and Western perspectives. This has raised alarms about the lack of diversity in artificial intelligence. There is also the worry that the technology will […]
Read MoreTag: OpenAI Labs
The Year A.I. Became the User and We Became the Tool
As a society, we’ve clearly benefited from promising A.I.-based technologies; this year I was thrilled to read about the ones that might detect breast cancer that doctors miss or let humans decipher whale communications. Focusing on those benefits, however, while blaming ourselves for the many ways that A.I. technologies fail us, absolves the companies behind […]
Read MoreThis A.I. Subculture’s Motto: Go, Go, Go
“E.A. is so 2019,” she said. “You go to their parties, the guys don’t know how to dress, and the conversations are totally controlled by these one or two thought leaders.” E/acc, she added, is “fun to be around.” These are, of course, verdicts on e/acc’s vibes, not its ideas, some of which are still […]
Read MoreKey Players in OpenAI’s Boardroom Drama
On Nov. 17, Silicon Valley tumbled into turmoil when Sam Altman, chief executive of the high-profile A.I. start-up OpenAI, was suddenly removed by the company’s board of directors. After a five-day roller-coaster ride that encapsulated the increasingly heated battle over the future of artificial intelligence, Mr. Altman was reinstated and a new board was created. […]
Read MoreInside OpenAI’s Crisis Over the Future of Artificial Intelligence
Around noon on Nov. 17, Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, logged into a video call from a luxury hotel in Las Vegas. He was in the city for its inaugural Formula 1 race, which had drawn 315,000 visitors including Rihanna and Kylie Minogue. Mr. Altman, who had parlayed the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT […]
Read MoreE.U. Agrees on Artificial Intelligence Rules With Landmark New Law
European Union policymakers agreed on Friday to a sweeping new law to regulate artificial intelligence, one of the world’s first comprehensive attempts to limit the use of a rapidly evolving technology that has wide-ranging societal and economic implications. The law, called the A.I. Act, sets a new global benchmark for countries seeking to harness the […]
Read MoreThe Race to Dominate A.I.
Just before Thanksgiving, a Silicon Valley giant appeared to implode before our eyes. A boardroom coup at OpenAI, the world’s hottest artificial intelligence company, pushed out its charismatic leader, Sam Altman. At the time, the ouster — and Altman’s roller-coaster ride to reclaim his job as C.E.O. — seemed sudden. In reality, it was more […]
Read MoreGoogle Updates Bard Chatbot With ‘Gemini’ A.I. as It Chases ChatGPT
For more than a year, Google has raced to build technology that could match ChatGPT, the eye-opening chatbot offered by the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI. On Wednesday, the tech giant took another step in the ongoing race, releasing a new version of its own chatbot, Google Bard. Available to English speakers in more […]
Read MoreHow Nations Are Losing a Global Race to Tackle A.I.’s Harms
When European Union leaders introduced a 125-page draft law to regulate artificial intelligence in April 2021, they hailed it as a global model for handling the technology. E.U. lawmakers had gotten input from thousands of experts for three years about A.I., when the topic was not even on the table in other countries. The result […]
Read MoreOne Year of ChatGPT: How A.I. Changed Silicon Valley Forever
At 1 p.m. on a Friday shortly before Christmas last year, Kent Walker, Google’s top lawyer, summoned four of his employees and ruined their weekend. The group worked in SL1001, a bland building with a blue glass facade betraying no sign that dozens of lawyers inside were toiling to protect the interests of one of […]
Read MoreHow Elon Musk and Larry Page’s AI Debate Led to OpenAI and an Industry Boom
Elon Musk celebrated his 44th birthday in July 2015 at a three-day party thrown by his wife at a California wine country resort dotted with cabins. It was family and friends only, with children racing around the upscale property in Napa Valley. This was years before Twitter became X and Tesla had a profitable year. […]
Read MoreSam Altman, Sugarcoating the Apocalypse
My favorite “Twilight Zone” episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — “To Serve Man” — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up. But as the cryptographers proceed, […]
Read MoreWhat’s Next for OpenAI, Binance Is Binanceled and A.I. Is Eating the Internet
Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube The drama at OpenAI is not over. Kevin and Casey take stock of new information they’ve gathered since last week, and look at how other artificial intelligence companies are trying to capitalize on the debacle. Then, why people are still buying cryptocurrency even after […]
Read MoreBig Companies Find a Way to Identify A.I. Data They Can Trust
Data is the fuel of artificial intelligence. It is also a bottleneck for big businesses, because they are reluctant to fully embrace the technology without knowing more about the data used to build A.I. programs. Now, a consortium of companies has developed standards for describing the origin, history and legal rights to data. The standards […]
Read MoreBack at OpenAI, Sam Altman Outlines the Company’s Priorities
Sam Altman, who was ousted and then reinstated as chief executive of OpenAI this month, outlined his priorities for the artificial intelligence company on Wednesday as he retook the reins. In a blog post, Mr. Altman, 38, said OpenAI would resume its work building safe A.I. systems and products that benefited its customers. He added […]
Read MoreSam Altman Rehired at OpenAI
Listen and follow ‘Hard Fork’Apple | Spotify | Amazon | YouTube In yet another head-spinning twist at OpenAI, Sam Altman was reinstated as the company’s chief executive on Tuesday night, a mere five days after the OpenAI board had fired him. The board will be overhauled and a new set of directors, including Bret Taylor […]
Read MoreExplaining OpenAI’s Board Shake-Up
For much of the past year, OpenAI’s board of directors has been criticized as too small and too divided to effectively govern one of the fastest-growing start-ups in Silicon Valley history. On Friday, the board’s dysfunction spilled into public view when four of its members fired Sam Altman, OpenAI’s popular and powerful chief executive. The […]
Read MoreThe OpenAI Drama Has a Clear Winner: The Capitalists
What happened at OpenAI over the past five days could be described in many ways: A juicy boardroom drama, a tug of war over one of America’s biggest start-ups, a clash between those who want A.I. to progress faster and those who want to slow it down. But it was, most importantly, a fight between […]
Read MoreThe Unsettling Lesson of the OpenAI Mess
Ensuring that A.I. serves humanity was always a job too important to be left to corporations, no matter their internal structures. That’s the job of governments, at least in theory. And so the second major A.I. event of the last few weeks was less riveting, but perhaps more consequential: On Oct. 30, the Biden administration […]
Read MoreInside the Coup at OpenAI
Cade Metz contributed reporting. The Daily is made by Rachel Quester, Lynsea Garrison, Clare Toeniskoetter, Paige Cowett, Michael Simon Johnson, Brad Fisher, Chris Wood, Jessica Cheung, Stella Tan, Alexandra Leigh Young, Lisa Chow, Eric Krupke, Marc Georges, Luke Vander Ploeg, M.J. Davis Lin, Dan Powell, Sydney Harper, Mike Benoist, Liz O. Baylen, Asthaa Chaturvedi, Rachelle […]
Read MoreSam Altman Is Reinstated as OpenAI’s Chief Executive
Sam Altman was reinstated late Tuesday as OpenAI’s chief executive, the company said, successfully reversing his ouster by the company’s board last week after a campaign waged by his allies, employees and investors. The board of directors will be overhauled, jettisoning several members who had opposed Mr. Altman. Adam D’Angelo, the chief executive of Quora, […]
Read MoreBefore Altman’s Ouster, OpenAI’s Board Was Divided and Feuding
Before Sam Altman was ousted from OpenAI last week, he and the company’s board of directors had been bickering for more than a year. The tension got worse as OpenAI became a mainstream name thanks to its popular ChatGPT chatbot. Mr. Altman, the chief executive, recently made a move to push out one of the […]
Read MoreThe OpenAI Coup Is Great for Microsoft. What Does It Mean for Us?
There was the coup that hit the headlines: the OpenAI board’s abrupt ousting of its co-founder and chief executive, Sam Altman. Now we are on the verge of a second, even more critical coup, one that cements control of one of the most powerful and promising technologies on the planet under one of this country’s […]
Read MoreOpenAI Shows that A.I. May Have an Inherent Governance Issue
OpenAI’s structural messiness The future of OpenAI, whose ChatGPT kick-started an arms race in artificial intelligence, has grown even cloudier. A majority of its workers called on its board to resign after ousting Sam Altman as C.E.O. over how fast to commercialize its technology. The conflict further underscores the peculiar oversight atop some of the […]
Read MoreThe Chaos at OpenAI, Explained
If they had been the plot of a science fiction movie, or an episode of “Succession,” the events at OpenAI last weekend would have seemed a little over-the-top. A secret board coup! Fears of killer A.I.! A star C.E.O., betrayed by his chief scientist! A middle-of-the-night staff revolt that threatens to change the balance of […]
Read MoreThe Long Shadow of Steve Jobs Looms Over the Turmoil at OpenAI
This superhero narrative is the secret engine of just about every book beloved by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Travis Kalanick, a founder of Uber, was a devotee of Ayn Rand, whose heroes are at war with society. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, was a childhood fan of “Star Trek,” where Captain Kirk made every decision […]
Read More‘I Think We’re Heading Toward the Best World Ever’: An Interview With Sam Altman
Kevin Roose: Yeah. So it stands for artificial general intelligence. And you could probably ask a hundred different A.I. researchers, and they would give you a hundred different definitions. Researchers at Google DeepMind just released a paper this month that sort of offers a framework. They have five levels, ranging from zero, which is no […]
Read MoreHow Microsoft’s Satya Nadella Kept the OpenAI Partnership Alive
Just two weeks ago, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella stood onstage next to OpenAI’s Sam Altman at the start-up’s conference in a former concert hall in San Francisco. Both wore black jeans, Mr. Altman in an army-green shirt and Mr. Nadella in navy casual. “We love you guys!” Mr. Nadella said as he turned to Mr. Altman. […]
Read MoreOpenAI and the Loss of a Founder
People are going to be talking about the blowup at OpenAI for years. ChatGPT itself — a product of OpenAI — could not have concocted a tale as wild as the one that unfolded over the weekend. OpenAI’s board of directors fired a co-founder, Sam Altman, as chief executive officer on Friday, saying he was […]
Read MoreThreat of OpenAI Staff Exodus Leaves Its Future Uncertain
The future of OpenAI is in jeopardy after more than 700 of its 770 employees signed a letter on Monday saying they may leave the company for Microsoft if the ousted chief executive, Sam Altman, is not reinstalled at the high-profile artificial intelligence start-up. OpenAI’s four-person board shocked the tech industry early Friday afternoon when […]
Read MoreSam Altman’s Ouster at OpenAI Scrambles the A.I. Power Dynamic
What next for an A.I. leader? Over just three days, the landscape for artificial intelligence has been reshaped drastically. On Friday morning, Sam Altman was the C.E.O. of OpenAI, the leader in commercializing generative A.I. through ChatGPT. By Monday, he had not only been fired by his board — he had also joined Microsoft, the […]
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