The AI Daily Brief: Artificial Intelligence News and Analysis - What Actually Matters with the Latest OpenAI Controversy

Episode Date: May 29, 2024

The OpenAI controversy continues to dominate headlines, with recent comments from former board member Helen Toner fueling the fire. Dive into the latest updates on OpenAI’s leadership changes, safety committee formation, and the broader implications for the AI industry. Get all the essential AI news and trends in just a few minutes. ** Join Superintelligent at https://besuper.ai/ -- Practical, useful, hands on AI education through tutorials and step-by-step how-tos. Use code podcast for 50% off your first month! ** ABOUT THE AI BREAKDOWN The AI Breakdown helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI.  Subscribe to The AI Breakdown newsletter: https://aidailybrief.beehiiv.com/ Subscribe to The AI Breakdown on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AIDailyBrief Join the community: bit.ly/aibreakdown

Today on the AI Daily Brief, more controversy surrounding Open AI. Before that in the headlines, chat GPT is now being used by 7% of Americans daily. The AI Daily Brief is a daily podcast and video about the most important news and discussions in AI. To join the conversation, follow the Discord link in the show notes. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief Headlines edition, all the AI headline news you need in around five minutes. We kick off today with an earnings report from Nvidia and surprise, surprise, it just keeps getting big. bigger. Wall Street Journal writes, Nvidia delivered a record quarter and signal that the AI boom is still going strong,

driving its already meteoric stock up above $1,000 a share. Revenue last quarter more than tripled year over year to $26 billion, and net profit was up $7x to $14.88 billion. Both were quarterly records and both beat analysts' expectations. The stock market obviously loved this, with share prices up 6% in pre-market trading following the report, and a single share surpassing $1,000. One of the things that's also really interesting, though, is that while currently the big cloud companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon account for around 45% of Nvidia's data center revenue, they're clearly trying to move to a world where they're not just selling to

data centers, but also selling directly to companies. At Dell's big annual event this week, for example, Nvidia and Dell talked about how they were trying to create the AI factories of the future, where individual companies had more direct access to this sort of capacity. CEO Jensen Huang said we are poised for our next wave of growth. From Bloomberg, NVIDIA emphasized Wednesday that it wants to sell its technology to a wider market, expanding beyond the giant cloud computing providers known as hyperscalers. Huang said that AI is moving to consumer internet companies, carmakers, biotechnology, and healthcare customers.

The large-scale deployment of Nvidia chips by Elon Musk's Tesla is one sign of that expansion. It continues to be a battle for NVIDIA to keep up with demand. Said Huang, nobody has ever manufactured supercomputers at volume. We're doing the best we can. The one other interesting note, as called out by the verge, was that NVIDIA will now make new AI chips every single year. Said Huang, I can announce that after Blackwell, there's another chip. We're on a one-year rhythm. The verge points out that until now, Nvidia produced a new architecture roughly once every two years, Ampier in 2020, Hopper in 2022, Blackwell in 2024, but that everything

is getting faster now. Next up in the headlines, you'll remember that recently Microsoft inked deal with UAE-based G-42. Part of why I was so interested in the deal is that it seemed to have been facilitated by the Department of Commerce and reflected geopolitics as much as business considerations. Basically, G-42 had been right at the center of the U.S. China tension, and the U.S. had been putting a ton of pressure on it to pick aside. Well, pick aside it did, and Microsoft's minority investment of $1.5 billion was part of that picking. Still, it's not without complications. Wright's Reuters, Microsoft President Brad Smith said the tech company's high-profile deal with the UAE-backed AI firm G-42 could eventually involve the transfer of sophisticated chips and tools,

a move that a senior Republican congressman warned could have national security implications, said Michael call the Republican chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee. Despite the significant national security implications, Congress still has not received a comprehensive briefing from the executive branch about this agreement. I am concerned the right guardrails are not in place to protect sensitive U.S. origin technology from Chinese espionage, given the CCP's interest in the UAE. To me, this sounds a little bit like, if this really was coming from the Department of Commerce, that was obviously a White House facilitated deal, that Congress just doesn't have visibility into. Anyway, there's tons more details here, but what's interesting to me continues to be just the

geopolitical implications of AI and how quickly they've become an ongoing concern. In the world of M&A, I'm wondering if we're not about to see a bit of a wave of consolidation in the AI space. We've had a couple boom years of funding, and now we're very naturally in the phase where companies are figuring out if there's enough of it there to raise a next round, or if it makes sense to try to join up with someone bigger. One company seemingly going through that decision-making process is adept, which was valued by investors at more than a billion last year, and which the information reports has held talks recently around a possible sale or strategic partnership with large tech companies, most notably meta.

Adept is in the much vaunted AI agent space, and of course that means they're dealing with not only intense competition from every angle in every direction, but also the fact that AI agents are still at this point highly theoretical. There is an existing consumer demand to tap into. It's a new behavior in a new category that's being invented on the fly. When it comes to something that challenging, they may decide that it makes sense to do that from within one of the big giants

that has the capital to actually pursue it to its full ends. Speaking of big companies, in what will be a surprise to no one, Amazon is apparently planning to give Alexa an AI upgrade, as well as a monthly subscription fee. Notably, this will not be included in Amazon Prime subscriptions. Right CNBC, Amazon will launch a more conversational version of Alexa later this year, potentially positioning it to better compete with new generative AI powered chatbots from companies including Google and OpenAI. Will the end of the year see us watching a souped up Alexa compete with a souped up Siri, both of them competing against some brand new OpenAI product?

Kind of seems like it. Speaking of an OpenAI product, the Washington Post reports that OpenAI didn't actually copy Scarlett Johansson's voice. They write, when OpenAI issued a casting call last May for a secret project to endow OpenAI's popular chat GPT with the human voice, the flyer had several requests. The actors should be non-union, they should sound between 25 and 45 years old, and their voices should be warm, engaging in charismatic. One thing the AI company didn't request, according to interviews with multiple people involved in the process and documents shared by OpenAI in response to questions from the Washington Post, a clone of actress Scarlett Johansson. This of course gets to the

conversation that's been happening where Scarlett Johansson released a statement expressing concern that she had been asked by OpenAI to use her voice. And when she said no, there ended up being a voice that kind of sounded like her. As I mentioned in a previous episode, I think there are multiple things going on here. There is the legal side of this, which at least this reporting from the Washington Post suggests that there might not be a there there. There's also just the broader question of the look and the public's trust or lack thereof in Sam Altman and OpenAI. For now, though, that is going to do it for today's headlines. Stay tuned for the main episode.

Hello, friends. Before we get back to the episode, I want to tell you about something special I'm doing on Super Intelligent this June. Super is, of course, our platform for AI learning. And I've heard from a lot of you that you really want something for a true AI beginner, someone who's really just getting their feet wet with these tools. So what I'm going to do is put together basically a course that sits on top of and uses Super Intelligent tutorials and lessons.

But where I hand guide you through around 10 different lessons in how to, that I think once you complete them will have you ahead of 80% of the other people who are just starting to use AI right now. If you are interested in this learning experience, go to B-super.a.i and sign up using code June. You'll get 25% off your first month, and I'll automatically add you to that AI for beginners group. That's B-super.a.i discount code June. See you there. Welcome back to the AI Daily Brief. It's been another day, and yet this news cycle around OpenAI and former board member Helen Toner's comments about OpenAI has continued to dominate headlines. In many ways, I think the coverage around it reflects a sort of

sensational gossipification of media where what we're really interested in is the controversy, not the substance. But I also think that the nature of the discussion is such that even if one does find the particulars, frustrating or annoying, I think that it does reveal something about people's underlying sensibilities about the importance of the AI industry. So let's go back and talk about a couple days of announcements and then get into the controversy. Over the last couple weeks, we have, of course, seen a number of high-profile departures from OpenAI. First, we finally got resolution on what was going to happen with OpenAI chief scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever. Ilya had been reportedly important in the initial ouster of Sam Altman, but then halfway

through the controversy reversed course and came to support Sam coming back. And in the wake of the whole campaign, everyone was wondering what was going to happen. It was one of the questions that Sam Altman got the most in interviews, to which he was always very circumspect. He always said that he hoped he continue to work with Ilya, that Ilya was a generational mind, but that he wasn't sure what was going to happen. However, in the middle of May, we found out what happened, and it was indeed Ilya leaving. Many wondered if this had been prearranged, with Ilya agreeing to if you did ultimately decide to leave not doing so for six months to create a little normalcy in the wake of the board shakeup, but in any case, he was gone. Next up was OpenAI's head of super

alignment, Jan Lakey, also leaving a couple days after Ilya's announcement, and doing so in a fairly loud way, where he basically said that OpenAI was not doing enough to prepare for these alignment challenges. The responses to this were very divergent. On the one hand, there were many folks who took it as a clear indicator that self-governance wasn't working at OpenAI, that there were big safety concerns with Open AI, and that, for example, government needed to get more involved. Then on the flip side, there were those like Tyler Cowan, the Bloomberg columnist and writer of marginal revolution, who saw in it something very different. Basically, in these changes, along with a recently announced plan from Chuck Schumer and other bipartisan leaders around regulating AI,

that the political capital of the AI safety movement was seemingly on the decline. This is a divergence that I think is worth paying attention to, because one of the ways to read OpenAI's actions recently is that they don't feel as much pressure as they used to when it comes to these big questions of alignment, AI risk, and AI safety. Following up from that, the company did announce a new safety committee. They call it the Safety and Security Committee, and it's basically people who are already at OpenAI.

Once again, the responses were pretty divergent, with the AI safety folks being none too pleased with this plan, but for a lot of others, the focus from the announcement was that they were finally discussing whatever would come after GPT4. Now, people have widely assumed that OpenAI has been training GPT5 for some time now, but this seemed to be the first acknowledgement that it was actually in progress, and that suggested to many that it might be coming soon. Then, however, the new TED AI show hosted by Bilawal Sidhu, which featured former OpenAI board member Helen Toner, dropped and started to dominate the conversation. Billowall tweeted what really happened at OpenAI. Former board member Helen Toner breaks her silence with shocking new details about Sam Altman's firing. In it, Helen got a little bit more explicit about some of the reasons that the board had come to mistrust Sam Altman.

But the big banner headline that everyone latched onto was that she claimed that she and a number of the board members learned about ChatGBT BT on Twitter. This seemed to some to be shocking and a clear indication of just how much contempt that Sam Altman had for this board, a validator of the argument that he was not to be trusted. Liam Balling, who notably works for Google Gemini, wrote this past week has raised questions about transparency and employee voice at OpenAI. Now, Liam pointed out that it wasn't just the Helen Toner controversy, but also the dissolving of the previous safety models at OpenAI, as well as the big dust-up around OpenAI HR threatening to clawback vested equity from employees who don't sign non-disparagement agreements. And of course, on top of that is the whole dust up with Scarlett Johansson and the legal dispute around the Sky Voice that they used to debut GPT-40.

And indeed, for some, this was the point, that there was a big pattern, emerging here that seems problematic. Benjamin DeKracker writes, I've repeatedly called out Sam Altman for what seems to me a repeat pattern of dishonesty. He says whatever it takes to get his way. Benjamin here pointed to that Helen Toner interview. However, this wasn't the universal opinion. Adapai, for example, writes, stunning display of incompetence. GBT 3.5 API was released in March 22. It was wrapped into chat GPT in November 22. It went viral. The audacity of we learned about chat GPT on Twitter. The point of this statement was, something that I believe has absolutely gotten lost in this whole discourse, which is that no one at

OpenAI expected ChatGPT to be the viral sensation it was. This point that the underlying model GPT 3.5 was already released is a really salient one. We have a sort of hindsight bias knowing how fast ChatGPT exploded that forgets that it was possible that they had no idea that it was going to be this big thing. To them, it was a meaningful product launch, but really nothing more than a blog post had the latest thing that they were doing. For those board members that weren't in the day-to-day trenches, there is at least an argument that it wasn't in the minds of the OpenAI staff some super important board notification type of moment. And of course, this is what frustrates me about the nature of media discourse right now is that the thing getting all the headlines, which is this

we found out about chat GPT on Twitter, is actually much less significant than these underlying questions of repeat patterns of problematic behavior, which to the extent that one wants to focus on these things should be the focus here. Still, the reason that I thought it was worth discussing on this show is that one of the things that is clear when you watch the discourse around open AI is that everyone has a sense that this technology is going to be hugely socially and economically significant. Because of that, absolutely everything that the leader in that space, at least based on technology state of the art, does, undergoes a microscope like normal companies aren't subjected to. It is an indicator to me hold aside any particular opinions on OpenAI or its leader

Sam Altman that the sense of the importance of generative AI to the future is immense. and that there is likely to be more and not less attention on it in the years to come. Now, a couple of denoumas to this story, which got lost in all of the controversy, one is that OpenAI has apparently backtracked on previous comments, saying that their mission is not to build superintelligence. From the Financial Times, while OpenAI is racing ahead with AI development, a senior OpenAI executive seemed to backtrack on previous comments by its CEO, Sam Altman, that it was ultimately aiming to build a superintelligence far more advanced than humans.

Anna Maconju, OpenAI's vice president of global affairs, told the Financial Times in an interview that its mission was to build artificial general intelligence capable of, quote, cognitive tasks that are what a human could do today. Said McConju, our mission is to build AGI. I would not say our mission is to build superintelligence. Superintelligence is a technology that is going to be orders of magnitude more intelligent than human beings on Earth. I think this is more than just a bingo game of pick your acronyms. I think there is a big middle space of discussion and people who might be very interested in coming to something close to what we now imagine as AGI, but who don't want to unleash super smart robot

bots that are 10 times better than us at everything on our species. I'll be watching to see if these comments are repeated and doubled down on in the future, or if this is just one errant moment. For now, though, lots of interesting things continue to happen. Obviously, I much prefer it when there are interesting technology stories to report on, but that's what's going on in the world of AI today, so that's what we had to discuss. Appreciate your listening and watching as always. Until next time, peace.