OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burning Through Piles of Money (5 minute read)
OpenAI's monthly revenue hit $300 million in August and it expects about $3.7 billion in annual sales this year. However, it expects to lose roughly $5 billion after paying for costs related to running its services. There will also be other costs such as equity-based compensation to employees. Its biggest cost is the computing power it gets through a partnership with Microsoft. OpenAI plans to raise ChatGPT Plus to $44 over the next five years.
Meta's new AI-made posts open a Pandora's box (3 minute read)
Meta is starting to test personalized content created by Meta AI in Facebook and Instagram. Content will be generated based on interests, with some featuring the user's likeness. Users will be able to edit the content or swipe to see more content generated in real time. They will be able to opt out of the feature.
The messy WordPress drama, explained (8 minute read)
WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg last week came out with a harsh attack on major WordPress hosting provider WP Engine, calling the company a 'cancer' to the community. This has escalated into a barrage of legal threats that has caught many website operators in a conflict beyond their control. WP Engine customers were off from accessing WordPress.org's servers, but the company has been granted a temporary reprieve. WP Engine claims that Automattic demanded a very large sum of money days before Mullenweg's attack and threatened to carry out a 'scorched earth nuclear approach' toward WP Engine if the amount wasn't received. Many more details about the situation are available in the article.
Gov. Newsom vetoes California's controversial AI bill, SB 1047 (3 minute read)
SB 1047 is a high-profile bill authored by State Senator Scott Wiener that would have made companies that develop AI models liable for implementing safety protocols to prevent 'critical harms'.
AI bots now beat 100% of those traffic-image CAPTCHAs (4 minute read)
Locally run bots using specially trained image-recognition models can achieve a 100% success rate when challenged with Google's ReCAPTCHA v2. Google has been phasing out the system in favor of a new 'invisible' system that analyzes user interactions. However, it is still used by millions of websites. Details about how the system works are available in the article.
Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Durk Kingma (3 minute read)
One of the lesser-known co-founders of OpenAI, Durk Kingma, is joining Anthropic. He has not revealed which org he will be joining or leading. Kingma will be working remotely mostly from the Netherlands, but will visit the San Francisco Bay Area as frequently as possible. Anthropic has also previously recruited OpenAI's former safety lead and another OpenAI co-founder. Its CEO was once the VP of research at OpenAI.
OpenAI unveils easy voice assistant creation at 2024 developer event (4 minute read)
OpenAI unveiled four major API updates for developers on Monday at its DevDay 2024 event in San Francisco. The most notable new API feature is the Realtime API, which enables developers to build features similar to ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode into their applications. It streamlines the process of creating voice assistants so developers can handle speech recognition, text processing, and text-to-speech conversion with a single API call. The other API updates enable developers to fine-tune smaller and cheaper models from more advanced models, speed up inference by remembering frequently used prompts, and fine-tune models using images.
Google is taking its rivalry with OpenAI to another level (2 minute read)
Teams at Google have made progress on software for AI models with humanlike reasoning abilities in recent months. The company is using chain-of-thought prompting, which allows large language models to solve multistep problems using a series of intermediate reasoning steps, to give models the ability to solve more complex math- and company-programming-related inquiries. OpenAI's new o1 model also uses chain-of-thought prompting. Google employees were worried last year that the company had fallen behind in the AI race, but they are now less concerned now that Google has unveiled more products to compete with.