OpenAI brain drain: What to make of CTO Mira Murati’s sudden exit
Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. I’m Mark Sullivan, a senior writer at Fast Company, covering emerging tech, AI, and tech policy.
This week, I’m focusing on the string of executive departures from OpenAI this year, with CTO Mira Murati being the latest. I also look at the bundle Google paid to AI pioneer Noam Shazeer to return to the fold, and the AI-related announcements from Meta at its developer event this week.
Sign up to receive this newsletter every week via email here . And if you have comments on this issue and/or ideas for future ones, drop me a line at [email protected] , and follow me on X (formerly Twitter) @thesullivan .?
OpenAI CTO Murati departs as company is set to abandon its nonprofit roots
It was just last year that Fast Company featured OpenAI CTO Mira Murati on the cover of its magazine. Inside was a revealing exposé, where Murati talked about her part in building? game-changing products like ChatGPT. Later that year Murati would briefly become CEO of OpenAI, when Sam Altman was forced out of the role. (He quickly reassumed the title.) Now Murati is gone, the latest in a string of executive departures at the hottest and best-funded AI startup in the world.?
Murati announced her departure on Thursday with a thankful and diplomatic letter to her coworkers, but left no hint as to her reasons for leaving. She did, however, mention that her exit comes just after the company passed an important milestone: “Our recent releases of speech-to-speech and OpenAl o1 mark the beginning of a new era in interaction and intelligence—achievements made possible by your ingenuity and craftsmanship,” she wrote.
Murati is the latest in a string of executive departures over the past year from OpenAI.?
Click here to read more about Mira Murati’s departure from OpenAI.
Google paid megabucks to get back AI pioneer Noam Shazeer
An AI company’s most important asset is its research talent: very smart mathematicians who know how to build, train, and improve large language models. And we’re seeing big tech companies strike licensing agreements with smaller startups for the underlying purpose of poaching one of those elite researchers.?
In August, news broke that Google had welcomed AI researchers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas back into the fold. The two had left Google in 2021 to found Character.AI , but had run into trouble monetizing the company, whose app offers AI personas that users can talk to. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports , key details have emerged around the return of Shazeer and De Freitas, namely that Google paid $2.7 billion to license Character.AI ’s software, but its real aim was very likely to recruit Shazeer.?
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Shazeer is an AI pioneer. He worked at Google until 2021, and during his time there he was one of the authors of the seminal 2017 “Attention is All You Need” paper , which proposed the Transformer model architecture that set off the current generative AI craze and powers most of the language models we use today.?
Click here to read more about Noam Shazeer’s return to Google.
Meta announces new Llamas that can see, new AI glasses tricks
At its Meta Connect developers event Wednesday, Meta announced a new generation of Llama AI models and some cool AI advancements in its AR glasses.
Meta debuted a couple of new Llama 3.2 models —one with a billion parameters and the other with 90 billion. Earlier Llama models could only process text, but the new 3.2 models can process images too.?
Meta is also releasing a pair of smaller models (one is a million parameters and the other is three million) that can run on mobile devices. The models can run on Qualcomm and MediaTek hardware, and are optimized for ARM processors, Meta says, and can be downloaded at llama.com and Hugging Face . They’re also available on a large number of cloud platforms, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Databricks.
Click here to read more about Meta’s latest AI announcements.
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