Executive Editor @theinformation. We're hiring. amir @ theinformation.com amir.62 on Signal
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Google paid ~$3 billion to hire AI genius Noam Shazeer.
He’s helped Gemini meaningfully since then but also kept posting inflammatory statements that angered colleagues and prompted Google to censor him.
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Exclusive: Microsoft deepens partnership w/ OpenAI as it looks to add GPT to Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Teams, etc.
Big move with big implications.
theinformation.com/articles/… @aaronpholmes @KevKubernetes
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Alex Wang timed his exit perfectly.
Scale AI was being beaten by a startup rival that never raised VC and was profitable the whole time
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new: DeepSeek's owner asked R&D staff to hand in passports so they can't travel abroad.
Ladies & gentlemen... China:
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NEW: Prominent Google AI researcher resigned after warning Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other senior execs that Bard—Google’s rival to ChatGPT—was *using data from ChatGPT*.
Big no-no in that world.
theinformation.com/articles/… w/ @jon_victor_
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OpenAI NEWS:
Sam Altman, Jony Ive, and Masa Son working on a AI hardware device, per @Jessicalessin @steph_palazzolo
theinformation.com/articles/…
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Just out: The truth about Waymo...
go.theinformation.com/4596b7…
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New: 3 OpenAI leaders are leaving.
President Greg Brockman going on extended leave, John Shulman to rival Anthropic, and product leader Peter Deng is also out.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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Why OpenAI is beating Google Gemini so badly, in one screenshot.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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F—ing blockbuster bonkers criminal allegations against Uber. This is like reading a spy flick script: thein.fo/b/ea953c2fe5dc31ad
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news: OpenAI's upcomning Orion model shows how GPT improvements are slowing down
It's prompting OpenAI to bake in reasoning and other tweaks after the initial model training phase.
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New: @fast is shutting down, a dramatic collapse for a 3yo company that raised $120M from @stripe & others, and hired hundreds of employees despite generating barely any revenue from its fast-checkout software.
theinformation.com/articles/…
by @Jessicalessin @luxeoflique
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News:
When Google CEO Sundar Pichai called @realDonaldTrump to congratulate him on the election win… a familiar tech face was on the line— Elon Musk.
theinformation.com/articles/… @erinkwoo
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GPT-5 is good.
But model performance gains are still slower than in past years and this year has been a technically challenging one for OpenAI researchers.
The inside story here...
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❗️Almost 700 of 770 OpenAI employees including Sutskever have signed letter demanding Sam and Greg back and reconstituted board with Sam allies on it.
That’s…powerful.
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if you use X / Twitter a lot, you might think ~everyone~ is supporting Trump after recent events.
turns out, no:
theinformation.com/articles/…
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EXCLUSIVE: @elonmusk personally takes over Model 3 production, bumping Doug Field (ex-Apple), who had had meteoric rise til now, plus other new details: theinformation.com/articles/… $TSLA
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~Big~ news in AI land—
Meta wants to make the next version of LLaMA — its open source LLM —available for commercial use.
theinformation.com/articles/… @SylviaVarnham @jon_victor_
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#Android OEM profitability by @charlesarthur (theoverspill.wordpress.com/2…). OEMs tell me they're at peace with this.
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new: OpenAI developing AI coding agent that aims to replicate a level 6 engineer, which its believe is a key step to AGI / ASI
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SCOOP: twtr didn't pay its AWS cloud bills on time ~and~ still has a shortfall of at least $70m per the 5-year contract it signed w/AWS, tried to renegotiate
amazon wasn't happy obv
by @erinkwoo @Twitter theinformation.com/articles/…
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🚀notable startup-funding alert🚀: productivity app maker @NotionHQ just raised $10M at $800M valuation. Only new investor is @danielgross. Lot of funds have been asking to get in on this. We talked to COO @akothari this afternoon... thein.fo/051dd431acd3603d
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"Her" is coming :)
NEW: OpenAI developed a new model with audio-in, audio-out capabilities and better reasoning. Even beats GPT-4 Turbo on some queries.
theinformation.com/articles/… @steph_palazzolo #AI
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Uh oh—
After Google got hammered for trying to use OpenAI data to train Bard, news has emerged that OpenAI secretly used YouTube data to train its models.
theinformation.com/articles/… @jon_victor_
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Exclusive: Uber algorithm calculated lowest possible comp offer for job candidates, perpetuating gender pay gap theinformation.com/after-rev…
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new: OpenAI leaders are worried about Musk's supercomputer, but they've worried even more about Anthropic's advances in AI coding.
The rivalry between Sam & Greg and the Amodeis is also deeply personal.
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Some news: OpenAI has been preparing to release its first open-source language model.
Meaning the startup taking a more hybrid approach than we realized.
Pressure will rise on Google to follow.
theinformation.com/articles/… by @jon_victor_
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👀 Google, Microsoft and Meta have ordered an ~incredible~ number of Nvidia's next flagship AI chips, the GB200.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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I can confirm that the Expensify Lounge in downtown SF is one of the most head-turning things I have seen here in the past 10 years.
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News: AI coding startup Magic.dev said it made a breakthrough in AI reasoning, not unlike OpenAI's Q*.
theinformation.com/articles/… w/ @steph_palazzolo
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You didn’t really think Microsoft—a $3T company with a shrewd CEO—would let OpenAI declare AGI based on a subjective, hazy definition, did you?
LINK:
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Ok it’s real. Woof.
Google has some serious work to do in the coming weeks to clean up its confidence scoring on conversational answers.
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wow -> TikTok has been buying an ~astounding~ amount of calls to OpenAI's GPT-4 as it... [develops competing models?]
theinformation.com/articles/… @aaronpholmes
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New: Travis Kalanick has said his kitchen-rental startup, CloudKitchens, could be worth $2.5b *now*, up from $450m in early 2018, and will be bigger than Uber. $uber theinformation.com/articles/…
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people call @satyanadella bet on OpenAI a management masterclass.
getting the rest of $msft to fall in lockstep behind outsourcing R&D... not simple.
Love this top from theinformation.com/articles/… @aaronpholmes
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News:
Revenue at OpenAI ~doubled~ in the last 6 months.
And while many ppl thought a lot of revenue was coming from Microsoft selling OpenAI tech and giving the startup a cut… au contraire. This revenue is almost all direct from ChatGPT and other OpenAI sales.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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the new NEW openai cap table is here.
read everything you wanna know about the corporate restructuring...
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News: OpenAI has hired two dozen Apple consumer hardware people and struck a deal with Apple supplier Luxshare for an AI device OpenAI is designing.
Apple is getting concerned about the defections…
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drama at @sequoia involving Botha is multipronged:
management style (which was v different from his predecessor Leone!), missed AI opportunities, tensions around Maguire activities on X...
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Here's one advantage of taking $$ from @sequoia: They can squeeze your company's short sellers e.g. Instacart.
theinformation.com/articles/… $cart @coryweinberg @theo_wayt
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News: OpenAI ChatGPT (and api) train keeps rolling, now a $12b annualized revenue business & 700m WAUs (but more cash burn too)
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New:
OpenAI developing two types of “AI agents.”
You’ll hear a lot about agents this year as they become all the rage.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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New: OpenAI losses doubled to $540m last year as revenue quadrupled.
CEO Altman has discussed possibility of a $100B capital raise (!)
More here: theinformation.com/articles/… w/ @erinkwoo
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News: Google convinced OpenAI to pay for tensor processing units and shift away from Nvidia.
OpenAI has ~billions and billions~ of reasons to seek cheaper AI chip alternatives
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Breaking: Nvidia's Blackwell chip is delayed, the company tells big customers.
Design flaw prevented the start of mass production.
theinformation.com/articles/… $nvda @QianerLiu @anissagardizy8
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🚗new: Amazon agrees to buy Zoox for $1B+
theinformation.com/articles/… $amzn
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news: ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati has barely left the building but already talked to some OAI colleagues about potentially joining her where she's going to next.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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If you wanna make it at top venture firms like Sequoia Capital & Founders Fund, you basically gotta generate $1 billion for the firm or peace out.
theinformation.com/articles/… via @nmasc_
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Google’s CEO just said he is unaware of tech theft by China, targeting US cos. He may have forgotten the seminal 2009 Aurora cyberattack from 🇨🇳, allegedly tied to PLA, that Google itself said successfully obtained *Google IP/source code*.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oper…
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Exclusive:
OpenAI is blowing by earlier revenue projections, already passed $1b ARR.
Turns out plenty of big companies like LLMs :)
theinformation.com/articles/… w / @aaronpholmes @OpenAI $msft
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new: One of OpenAI's next supercomputing clusters will have 100,000 Nvidia GB200s.
It will be rather powerful.
more here: theinformation.com/articles/… @anissagardizy8
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Sam Altman’s tweet Easter eggs are pretty cool I have to admit.
OpenAI’s Orion is coming…
theinformation.com/articles/…
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Senior execs/managers at 🚗🛴Uber🚐🍟 say:
*"Ride-sharing" aka UberPool doesn't work
*Uber less efficient than rival startups in food + scooters/bikes
*Autonomous vehicle R&D: 👎
*Uber Cash, Uber Bus: 🦥
*Unit leaders being held accountable?🤷♂️🤷♀️
theinformation.com/articles/… $uber
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May seem like a small thing to non-reporters but Facebook loses credibility by issuing a Friday night press release to “front-run” publications that were set to publish negative articles about its platform. If you want us to become more suspicious, mission accomplished.
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whoever did Oracle's due diligence for its $30B acquisition of electronic health records firm Cerner in 2022 did bad, bad job. quite a story.
theinformation.com/projects/… @dodgeblake @ashannstew
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At a high level, the self-driving car race is between:
Team Integrated: @waymo @Ford @GM @voyage @DidiChuxing @UberATG @torcrobotics @aurora_inno @driveai_ @Tesla @AI_motive
Team Modular: @BMW @DelphiAuto @fiat @Volkswagen @Baidu_Inc @renovo_auto @nvidia @lyft @Zenuity @Daimler
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news: one of Microsoft's top AI researchers, @SebastienBubeck, is moving to OpenAI.
theinformation.com/briefings…
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New: OpenAI has designed collaboration and chat features for ChatGPT. Launching them would be a direct assault on Google Workspace, Microsoft Office.
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.@Waymo engineers said today that using neural nets and behavior cloning to do an "end to end" self-driving system probably will not work. (arxiv.org/abs/1812.03079)
They do not name Tesla but it appears to be an implicit dig at Tesla's approach/long-term philosophy.
I also learned a lot about how Autopilot works, including the use of “behavior cloning” in path planning and the limitations of “shadow mode” testing on the existing fleet. go.theinformation.com/1cae04…
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Want to know why Wiz grew so quickly and went from zero to (maybe) $23B in four years?
Part of the answer lies with its earliest backer, Cyberstarts, and its network of corporate CISOs that buy startup products.
theinformation.com/articles/… @aaronpholmes
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New:
Andreessen Horowitz and other investors / partners in Synapse, the just-collapsed fintech, were aware of recordkeeping discrepancies for years
theinformation.com/articles/… @MichaelRoddan
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news: the DeepSeek freakout is ~real~
Meta Platforms, worried DS is better than Llama 4 (which isn't out yet), sets up four war rooms to figure out how Chinese did what they did. Meta is NOT alone.
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~news~
OpenAI has demo'ed its unreleased Strawberry reasoning AI to U.S. national security officials.
Every rival will feel pressure to do the same.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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❗️exclusive: Jony Ive & Sam Altman's mysterious AI device company in funding talks w/ Laurene Powell Jobs's firm & OpenAI investor Thrive.
it will not look like a phone btw :)
more here: theinformation.com/articles/…
@Jessicalessin @KateClarkTweets @coryweinberg
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A senior DataRobot data scientist resigned last night and sent this note to staff:
How crazy was the 2021 private tech bubble? *This* crazy:
theinformation.com/articles/… @KevKubernetes
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it's true: OpenAI is developing an X-like social feed for ChatGPT. at the moment, posting to the feed is known as a "yeet." 😀
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🔥💵 News: OpenAI says it will burn $115 BILLION through 2029, $80 billion higher than it projected earlier this year.
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News: It’s nearly official… that Anthropic is the new king of AI API sales.
Boatload of new financials and projections below
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Also these must be end times because the leaders of Google Brain and @DeepMind do NOT like working together but were forced to do so.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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OpenAI’s ability to shrink its reasoning model without losing many capabilities might be as big a deal as the reasoning power itself.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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good. lord.
the twitter ad business is a bigger disaster that you thought. theinformation.com/articles/… @sizpatel @erinkwoo
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🚨OpenAI made a major technical breakthrough before Altman firing and we figured out what it is.
Meet Q* (Q star) & the method Ilya Sutskever developed to get over LLM limitations around training data.
theinformation.com/articles/… @jon_victor_
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To put a finer point on it, the future seems to be LLMs combined with reasoning models that do better with more inference power. The sky isn’t falling.
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Google just made one of the most expensive acquihires in Silicon Valley history to get back some AI talent it lost.
For comparison, Apple paid about $900 million (in 2024 bucks) to get Steve Jobs back in 1996. More here:
theinformation.com/articles/…
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New:
OpenAI’s full P&L and financial projections through 2029, the first year it is projecting a profit.
Losses will triple to $14b by 2026.
theinformation.com/articles/… @coryweinberg
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🐶 you guys -- an ex-OpenAI engineer is actually trying to make Dug's dog collar from "UP."
more here: theinformation.com/articles/… @jingyanghk
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We have received criticism for reporting on Oracle margins on its GPU rentals to OpenAI and others.
OF COURSE THEYRE LOSING MONEY ON BLACKWELLS, the critics (and Jensen Huang) said. THESE ARE BRAND NEW CHIPS
But these critics didn’t bother looking at the other issue: making money from renting out non-Blackwell Nvidia chips is super hard for Oracle too.
theinformation.com/articles/…
>be Oracle finance intern, 3rd week, still doesn't know what depreciation is
>The Information drops bombshell: “Oracle LOSES money on every GPU, margins negative 200%”
>normies panic, stock wobbles like a Jenga tower in a wind tunnel
>open article, first quote: “they bought $100M of Blackwell and instantly lost $100M”
>mfw they think depreciation = cash bonfire
>mfw they don’t know “available for use” ≠ “customers actually using”
>site powered, racks blinking, depreciation clock starts like the Purge siren
>revenue still doing the Windows update: “0 % complete, please wait”
>journalist math: zero revenue – big depreciation = “Oracle literally sets money on fire”
>tweet article, gain 50k likes, win Pulitzer for creative fiction
>meanwhile Oracle: “Yeah, once we flip the switch we print $60B lifetime on that GW”
>35% gross margin, $20B profit, but sure Karen, it’s “bankruptcy”
>next article: “Water is unprofitable because we counted the entire ocean as expense”
>close laptop, go long ORCL, short journalism degrees
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🛩️👀 How concerned are @elonmusk rivals about his unprecedented Colossus cluster of Nvidia chips for xAI ?
They’re flying spy planes over the building.
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Cognition's internal AI coding benchmark (evaluation) is so good, OpenAI & Anthropic use it.
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NEW: Silicon Valley Bank CEO just held a call with VC firms where he asked them to stay calm during the “panic” and that the bank is fine—unless everyone tells everyone SVB is in trouble. $sivb theinformation.com/articles/…
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How about we set up an interview and you can tell me, among other things, what you think is worth writing about?
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New:
OpenAI employees are jumping ship after Sutskever reaffirms Altman firing.
Sunday bloody Sunday.
theinformation.com/articles/…
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Vast majority of Uber & Lyft drivers *still* don't want to be employees, prefer being independent contractors, per @TheRideshareGuy. (Presumably because these have been side gigs for them, not primary source of income.)
therideshareguy.com/californ…
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I remember when I was when OpenAI released the ARC benchmark results for o3. It was insane.
But internally, researchers saw those gains dissipate when they distilled the model into chat form.
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Huge news: Meta in talks to hire SSI cofounder Daniel Gross and ex Github CEO Nat Friedman
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Addendum: Vast majority of Uber employees arrived after Uber's share price reached $48.77, and many of them got RSUs at that price or near it. Current price: $41.60. For many, the bonus awards they received are worth less today than at the time they were granted. #UberIPO
The story of $uber IPO isnt the massive amounts made by the founders and investors, but the 1000s of employees that are receiving life changing money for their hard work.
They are the future angel investors, founders and philanthropists.
They are the story of Silicon Valley.
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NEW: Trouble in the Musk-verse as his hand-picked leader for anti-woke AI company was arrested last month for domestic violence.
theinformation.com/articles/… by @jon_victor_
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The new interim OpenAI CEO @eshear, as everyone can see, has said he wants to slow down the pace of AI development to ensure products are made safely. Means he is, as one would expect, aligned with Ilya Sutskever (the master of OpenAI).
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