Sam Altman's Return, the Mysterious Q, and More of the Top AI News of the Week

Sam Altman's Return, the Mysterious Q, and More of the Top AI News of the Week

After OpenAI's big blowup last week, the tech world is back to business as usual.

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If you’re behind on what’s happening with the robot uprising, have no fear. Here’s a quick look at some of the weirdest and wildest artificial intelligence news from the past week. And be sure to check out our weekly newsletter on the biggest developments in AI.

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Last week, the AI world was thrown into upheaval with the shocking ouster of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In the wake of the drama that unfolded, it seemed like the equilibrium of the tech industry might have been permanently thrown off course. However, this week things were pretty much back to normal. Altman, of course, has managed to clamber back up on his perch as top executive at the company (thanks to a helping hand from Microsoft), while things in Silicon Valley have continued apace in much the way they normally would have: a number of new AI products and platforms were rolled out, another study showed the less than ideal impact artificial intelligence has on the environment, and someone found a way to ruin memes with AI.

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Sam Altman officially returned as CEO of OpenAI Wednesday, bringing back his party which includes Greg Brockman as President, Mira Murati as CTO, and new board members. OpenAI’s co-founder, former chairman, and chief scientist, Ilya Sutskever, is not back yet, and his position at the company is yet to be determined. —Maxwell Zeff Read More

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Sports Illustrated Allegedly Dupes Readers With Fake AI-Created Writers

Sports Illustrated Allegedly Dupes Readers With Fake AI-Created Writers

Image for article titled Sam Altman's Return, the Mysterious Q, and More of the Top AI News of the Week
Photo: Frederic J. BROWN / AFP (Getty Images)

The parent company that owns the storied and once-lauded magazine Sports Illustrated has been shoveling more AI slop into its readers’ eyeballs. Instead of telling its audience the garbled, nonsensical AI-created content was crafted by a chatbot, the company has tried to smuggle the fake content to readers with bogus writers sporting AI-generated headshots. The company claims this was the result of a third party’s actions.—Kyle Barr Read More

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Amazon is throwing its e-commerce bulk into the AI game like an enormous capybara stampeding into the outside lane of the ongoing AI rat race. The company finally shared details of its new AI chatbot assistant dubbed “Q” at its AWS re:Invent event on Tuesday. Just as can be expected from the starched suits at Amazon, Q is the kind of chatbot that only wants to talk about productivity, synergy, or whatever other business jargon. —Kyle Barr Read More

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Gif: Runway

Last week, Stability AI announced a new tool called Stable Video Diffusion, a model that turns images into AI-generated videos. It was only a matter of minutes before people jumped on it and started flooding the world with more content from the robotic abyss. —Thomas Germain Read More

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OpenAI’s GPT Store, a marketplace of customizable chatbots, is slated to roll out any day now, but users should be careful about uploading sensitive information when building GPTs. Research from cybersecurity and safety firm Adversa AI indicates GPTs will leak data about how they were built, including the source documents used to teach them, merely by asking the GPT some questions. —Maxwell Zeff Read More

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There’s been a lot of talk about AGI lately—artificial general intelligence—the much-coveted AI development goal that every company in Silicon Valley is currently racing to achieve. AGI refers to a hypothetical point in the future when AI algorithms will be able to do most of the jobs that humans currently do. According to this theory of events, the emergence of AGI will bring about fundamental changes in society—ushering in a “post-work” world, wherein humans can sit around enjoying themselves while robots do most of the heavy lifting. If you believe the headlines, OpenAI’s recent palace intrigue may have been partially inspired by a breakthrough in AGI—the so-called “Q” program—which sources close to the startup claim was responsible for the power struggle.

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But, according to recent research from Yann LeCun, Meta’s top AI scientist, artificial intelligence isn’t going to be general-purpose anytime soon. Indeed, in a recently released paper, LeCun argues that AI is still much dumber than humans in the ways that matter most. —Lucas Ropek Read More

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The New Yorker has a new in-depth article about the OpenAI brouhaha from last week. If you’re interested in what went down at the influential startup, it’s basically a must-read. Read More

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Screenshot: X/@AnnaIndianaAI/Lucas Ropek

Everybody meet Anna Indiana, a wholly AI-generated pop singer. The singer is looking for stans, which she’s dubbed “stannas” but instead she mostly got a lot of hate from the internet because she’s unholy abomination and everything that’s wrong with the world. Read More

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'Even AI Rappers are Harassed by Police' | AI Unlocked
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Associate Professor of Hip-Hop A.D Carson, talks about the use of AI in the music industry. —Thomas Germain 

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Photo: Bartek Winnicki (Shutterstock)

Creating images with generative AI could use as much energy as charging your smartphone according to a new study Friday that measures the environmental impact of generative AI models for the first time. Popular models like ChatGPT’s Dall-E and Midjourney may produce more carbon than driving 4 miles. —Maxwell Zeff Read More 

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Image: AWS

How hard is it to check whether an image is an AI deepfake or not? Well, Amazon claims it has some sort of answer with its own watermarking system for Amazon Titan Image Generator, the new AI art creator it announced today. Of course, it’s not that easy. Each business that makes use of the model will have to outline how users can check if that image they found online was actually just another AI deepfake. —Kyle Barr Read More

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OpenAI is delaying the launch of its GPT Store, a marketplace of customizable GPTs, until 2024, according to a memo seen by Axios. Sam Altman told an audience at DevDay that the GPT Store would launch in November. —Maxwell Zeff Read More 

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