Weekend Warp
Jaspreet Bindra
Founder - AI&Beyond and Tech Whisperer Ltd | ex-CDO Mahindra, Microsoft, TAS | Author - The Tech Whisperer | Faculty - AshokaU, SingularityU | M St - AI & Ethics, Cambridge University | Gurgaon, Cambridge, Dubai
So much news, so little space
Lets start with OpenAI as we usually do. Not a good week for them as three more of their cofounders either left for other companies or for ‘sabbaticals’. The most surprising was Greg Brockman , who vociferously defended Sam Altman in the ‘boardroom coup’ drama. Along with Sam and CTO Mira Murati , he was the face of the company. Two others resigned too – John Schulman to Anthropic (which itself is founded by ex-OpenAI people). Founders do leave startups, and especially if there are 11 of them to start with. But with nine of them now left, the boardroom drama, and Sam’s rumored people issues, this is a bit worrying. The core issue seems to be the philosophical struggle between profit or capitalistic motivations v/s the original aim of creating aligned, safe, responsible AI. Schulman left citing that, and Ilya Sutskever , arguably the most pivotal co-founder, also left to start Safe Super Intelligence, with an emphasis on the word ‘safe’.? Competition is heating up, with even ally 微软 pursuing its own parallel efforts. So, tough times for OpenAI.
Sam Altman does not seem to be worried, though. According to a Reuters report, his company OpenAI is working on a model capable of advanced reasoning that's one step closer to autonomous AI agents, a step towards the eternal dream of AGI. Internal documents leaked to the outlet describe Strawberry (formerly called Q*) as a model that enables "the company’s AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms 'deep research'." More advanced reasoning capabilities means the technology can execute more complex tasks beyond step-by-step user prompts. Reasoning has been one of the trickiest problems to solve in the pursuit of human-level intelligence, so Strawberry would be a breakthrough in achieving AGI (artificial general intelligence). It was Q* which reportedly prompted the famous boardroom coup and hastened Ilya Sutskever ‘s exit. Perhaps Altman wants to quickly replace his scampering co-founders with super intelligent AI agents??.
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Oh, and they also released the voice version of GPT 4o-Mini. While only in the US and select countries, it promises to be a game changer. The new chatbot represents OpenAI’s push into a new generation of AI-powered voice assistants in the vein of Siri and Alexa, but with far more capabilities to enable more natural, fluent conversations. It is a step in the march to more fully capable AI agents. The new ChatGPT voice bot can tell what different tones of voice convey, responds to interruptions, and reply to queries in real time.
As they say America innovates, China replicates, and Europe regulates. True to form, the EU became the first to bring in regulation around AI and Generative AI with its EU AI Act. Modeled on the famous, or infamous, GDPR, this is the first comprehensive regulation that any country or geographical grouping has brought out, even as every other country is talking about it. The tentacles of this Act reach out to companies beyond the EU, as anyone doing business with a European company will have to follow this regulation, again much like the GDPR. Grudging admiration to the Europeans who have made the first step; let’s see how successful it is in regulating the bad of AI, without stifling innovation too much.
The space is certainly heating up....... at warp speed.