Tag Archives: OpenAI

Inside Elon Musk’s Quest To Beat Open AI At It’s Own Game

Elon Musk, X

Elon Musk spent the past year building his artificial intelligence startup xAI at breakneck speed. Now he has to turn it into a real business, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Musk started xAI last summer in an effort to play catch-up with OpenAI, the ChatGPT developer he co-founded and left in 2018 after a power struggle. He poached talent from across the industry. He pushed contractors to build a massive new data center in a matter of months, a nearly unheard of timeframe for a project of that size.

Now, he is promising the facility in Memphis, Tenn. will help xAI deliver the world’s most powerful AI “by every metric” by December.

Most of xAI’s revenue has come from Musk’s own web of companies. xAI’s main product – its Grok chatbot – is available only to subscribers of his social network X. The startup is powering customer support features for SpaceX’s Starlink Internet service, people with knowledge of the matter said. It is also expected to help create new AI features for X’s search engine, one of the people said.

The startup has discussed deal with Tesla whereby xAI would get some Tesla revenue in exchange for providing the carmaker with access to its technology and resources.

TechCrunch reported Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, is reportedly preparing a release a stand-alone consumer app.

The app will likely arrive after xAI closes its next funding round, which could reach $5 billion and value the company $50 billion, per the Financial Times — double its valuation six months ago. Musk is said to have given investors who backed his $44 billion Twitter acquisition 25% (or access up to 25%) of the shares in xAI to reward their loyalty.

According to the FT, some of Musk’s backers — including Fidelity, Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey — could be made whole through shares in xAI thanks to the startup’s massive rise in value.

The Verge reported Elon Musk’s xAI could soon make its next move to compete with OpenAI: launching a standalone app for its Grok chatbot.

Musk created xAI as an alternative to OpenAI, the company he helped found but later distanced himself from over ideological differences. Now, The Wall Street Journal reports, xAI is planning to launch an app as soon as December that could go head-to-head with Open AI’s ChatGPT as it races to scale up. 

Currently, users can access Grok through X, but only if they subscribe to the service. Citing unnamed sources, the Journal reports that xAI is also behind customer support features for Starlink, part of Musk’s other company, SpaceX.  X did not immediately respond to a rust for comment on the report.

In my opinion, it looks like Elon Musk is very interested in making use of xAI right now. I’m not entirely sure what he plans to do with that.

OpenAI Plans To Release Its Next Big Model By December

AI

OpenAI plans to launch Orion, its next frontier model, by December. The Verge reported.

Unlike the release of OpenAI’s last two models, GPT-4o and o1, Orion won’t initially be released widely through ChatGPT. Instead, OpenAI is planning to grant access first to companies it works closely with in order for them to build their own products and features, according to a source familiar with the plan.

Another source tells The Verge that engineers inside Microsoft — OpenAI’s main partner for deploying AI models — are preparing to host Orion on Azure as early as November. While Orion is seen inside OpenAI as the successor to GPT-4, it’s unclear if the company will call it GPT-5 externally. As always, the release plan is subject to change and could slip. Microsoft declined to comment for this story, and OpenAI initially declined.

After CEO Sam Altman called this story “fake news,” OpenAI spokesperson Niko Felix told The Verge that the company doesn’t “have plans to release a model code-named Orion this year” but that “we do plan to release a lot of other great technology.”

TechCrunch reported OpenAI says that it doesn’t intend to release an AI model code-named Orion this year, countering recent reporting on the company’s product roadmap.

“We don’t have plan to release a model code-named Orion this year,” a spokesperson told TechCrunch via mail. “We do plan to release a lot of other great technology.”

OpenAI previously told TechCrunch that The Verge’s report wasn’t accurate, but declined to elaborate further.

Orion, a step up from OpenAI’s current flagship, GPT-4o, is reportedly trained in part on synthetic training data from o1, the company’s “reasoning” model. Open AI plans for the foreseeable future to continue developing new “GPT” models alongside reasoning models like o1, which it sees as addressing fundamentally different use cases.

Open AI’s statement leaves substantial wiggle room. It could be that the company’s next major model isn’t, in fact, Orion. Or perhaps, OpenAI will release a new model by December, but one less capable than Orion.

TechRadar reported OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has slammed a media report about the imminent release of Orion, which is effectively ChatGPT-5, with a terse tweet on X.com. He described the report as “fake news out of control,” squashing rumors of a new version of ChatGPT before December.

The report by The Verge quotes ‘sources’ as claiming Microsoft is planning to host Orion, the successor to ChatGPT-4 on its servers in November, pointing towards a release for the new LLM in time for ChatGPT’s 2nd birthday next month.

Many users took this to mean a new product launch was imminent around the time of ChatGPT’s 2nd birthday (ChatGPT was released on 30 November 2022). Altman’s latest X.com post however would seem to remove any ambiguity around the event.

In my opinion, it appears that various news sites have either gotten their news regarding Orion from sources that are unnamed. As such, we will have to wait and see what actually happens.

Apple No Longer In Talks To Join OpenAI Investment Round

Apple,

Apple is no longer in talks to participate in an OpenAI funding round expected to raise as much as $6.5 billion, an 11th hour end to what would have been a rare investment by the iPhone maker in another major Silicon Valley company, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Apple recently fell out of the talks to join the round, which is slated to close next week, according to a knowledgable person.

Two other tech giants, Microsoft and Nvidia, have also been in talks to participate in the round. Microsoft is expected to invest around $1 billion, adding to the $13 billion it already has put into the company, according to people familiar with the matter.

The funding talks aren’t complicated and it is possible the participants and investment amounts could change.

OpenAI is also in the process of overhauling its corporate structure from a nonprofit into a for-profit company. That change, which was encouraged by many of the investors in the round, will be a complicated process for the startup. If it doesn’t complete the change within two years, investors in the current round will have the right to request their money back.

9To5 Mac reported Apple was first reported to be discussing an OpenAI investment last month. It was never clear, however, how much Apple might’ve invested in the company. 

Microsoft, of course, is already a major investor in OpenAI and owns a 49% share of its profits. Today’s report suggests Microsoft is set to expand its OpenAI investment with another $1 billion through this latest round.

The news of Apple’s decision to pass on investing in OpenAI comes amid more leadership and structural changes at the company. Former Apple design chief Jony Ive also recently confirmed that he is working with OpenAI to design an AI hardware product.

Apple and OpenAI are teaming up to integrate ChatGPT into iOS 18 later this year. Through this partnership, ChatGPT will handle world knowledge requests in combination with Siri.

Mashable reported Apple is reportedly no longer in talks with ChatGPT creator OpenAI for investing in its latest fundraising round.

The Washington Post reported on Friday that a “knowledgable person” reported that Apple fell out of talks to join this round. It’s a surprise because the news came at such a late hour — the talks are scheduled to wrap up this upcoming week — but should’t shock anyone too intensely.

Apple rarely invests in another Silicon Valley company, and is known for being pretty conservative in the world of direct investments and acquisitions in comparison to other tech giants.

In my opinion, Apple can do whatever it wants to, including opting-out of supporting OpenAI.

OpenAI Release o1, Its First Model With ‘Reasoning’ Abilities

Information

OpenAI is releasing a new model called o1, the first in a planned series of “reasoning” models that have that have been trained to answer more complex questions, faster than a human can. It’s being released alongside o1-mini, a smaller, cheaper version. And yes, if you’re steeped in AI rumors: this is, in fact, the extremely hyped Strawberry model, The Verge reported.

For OpenAI, o1 represents a step toward its broader goal of human-like artificial intelligence. More practically, it does a better job at writing code and solving multistep problems than previous models. But it’s also more expensive and slower to use than GPT-4o. OpenAI is calling this release of o1 a “preview” to emphasize how nascent it is.

ChatGPT Plus and Team users get access to both o1-preview and o1-mini starting today, while Enterprise and Edu users will get access early next week. OpenAI says it plans to bring o1-mini access to all the free users of ChatGPT but hasn’t set a release date yet.

Developer access to o1 is really expensive: In the API, o1-preview is $15 per 1 million input tokens, or chunks of test parsed by the model, and $60 per 1 million output tokens. For comparison, GPT-4o costs $5 per 1 million input tokens and $15 per 1 million output tokens. 

OpenAI posted the following:  

We’re releasing OpenAI o1-mini, a cost-efficient reasoning model. O1-mini excels at STEM, especially math and coding — nearly matching the performance of OpenAIo1 on evaluation benchmarks such as AIME and Codeforces. We expect o1-mini will be a faster, cost-effective model for applications that require reasoning without broad world knowledge.

Today, we are launching o1-mini to tier 5 API users at a cost that is 80% cheaper than OpenAI o1-preview. ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu users can use o1-mini as an alternative to o1-preview, with higher rate limits and lower latency.

Wired reported  OpenAI made the last big breakthrough in artificial intelligence by increasing the size of its models to dizzying proportions, when it introduced GPT-4 last year. The company today announced a new advance that signals a shift in approach — a model that can “reason” logically through many different problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without a major scale-up.

The new model, dubbed OpenAI o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI’s most powerful existing model, GPT-4o. Rather than summon up an answer in one step, as a large language model normally does, it reasons through the problem, effectively thinking out loud as a person might, before arriving at the right result.

The new model was a code-named Strawberry within OpenAI, and is not a successor to GPT-4o but rather a compliment to it, the company says. 

In my opinion, OpenAI o1 could be useful for those who are teaching – or learning – how o1 works. Unfortunately, it appears that accessing it can come at a very high price point.

OpenAI Launches GPT-4o Mini

AI

OpenAI announced it will launch a new AI model, “GPT-4o mini,” the artificial intelligence startup’s latest effort to expand use of its popular chatbot, on Thursday, CNBC reported.

The company called the new release “the most capable and cost efficient small model available today,” and it plans to integrate image, video, and audio into it later.

The mini AI model is an offshoot of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s fastest and most powerful model, which it launched in May during a live-streamed event with executives. The “o” in GPT-4o stands for omni, and GPT-4o has improved audio, video and text capabilities, with the ability to handle 50 different languages at improved speed and quality, according to the company.

OpenAI posted: GPT-4o mini: advancing cost-efficient intelligence

OpenAI is committed to making intelligence as broadly accessible as possible. Today, we’re announcing GPT-4o mini, our most cost-efficient small model. We expect GPT-4o mini will significantly expand the range of applications built with AI by making intelligence much more affordable. 

GPT-4o mini scores 82% on MMLU and currently outperforms GPT-4(1) on chat preferences in LMSYS leaderboard. It is priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens, an order of magnitude more affordable than previous frontier models and more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo.

GPT-4o mini enables a broad range of tasks with its los cost and latency, such as applications that chain or parallelize multiple model calls (e.g., calling multiple APIs), pass a large volume of context to the model (e.g., full code base or conversation history), or interact with customers through fast, real-time text responses (e.g., customer support chatbots).

Today, GPT-4o mini supports text and vision in the API, with support for text, image, video and audio inputs and outputs coming in the future. The model has a context window of 128K tokens, supports up to 16K output tokens per request, and has knowledge up to October 2023. Thanks to the improved tokenizer shared with GPT-41 , handling non-English text is now even more cost effective…

TechCrunch  reported OpenAI introduced GPT-4o mini on Thursday, its latest small AI model. The company says GPT-4o mini, which is cheaper and faster than OpenAI’s current cutting edge AI models, is being released for developers, as well as through the ChatGPT web and mobile app for consumers starting today. Enterprise users will gain access next week.

The company said GPT-4o mini outperforms industry leading small AI models on reasoning tasks involving text and vision. As small AI models improve, they are becoming more popular for developers due to their speed and cost efficiencies compared to larger models such as GPT-4 Omni or Claude 3.5 Sonnet. They’re a useful option for high-volume simple tasks that developers might repeatedly call on an AI model to preform.

In my opinion, it might be better to use a smaller version of GPT-4o than to make larger ones that require things that humans need. More specifically, I have concerns about how much water gets used by AI systems.

Microsoft And Apple Drop OpenAI Seats Amid Antitrust Scrutiny

Microsoft, ,

Microsoft has given up its seat as an observer on the board of OpenAI while Apple will not take up a similar position, amid growing scrutiny by global regulators of Big Tech’s investments in AI start-ups, Financial Times reported.

Microsoft, which has invested $13bn in the maker of the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, said in a letter to OpenAI that its withdrawal from its board role would be “effective immediately”.

Apple had also been expected to take an observer role on OpenAI’s board as part of a deal to integrate ChatGPT into the iPhone maker’s devices, but would not do so, according to a person with direct knowledge of the matter. Apple declined to comment.

OpenAI would instead host regular meetings with partners such as Microsoft and Apple and investors Thrive Capital and Khosla Ventures — part of “a new approach to informing and engaging key strategic partners” under Sarah Friar, the former Nextdoor boss who was hired as its first chief financial officer last month, an OpenAI spokesperson said.

The move comes as antitrust authorities in the EU and US examine the partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI as part of broader concerns about competition in the rapidly growing sector.

CNBC reported Microsoft said it would give up its observer seat on the OpenAI board amid regulatory scrutiny into generative artificial intelligence in Europe and the U.S. 

Microsoft’s deputy general counsel, Keith Tolliver, wrote a letter to OpenAI late Tuesday, saying that the position had provided insights into the board’s activities without compromising its independence.

But the letter, seen by CNBC, added that the seat was no longer needed as Microsoft had “witnessed significant progress from the newly formed board.” CNBC reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI for comment.

The European Commission previously said Microsoft could face an antitrust investigation, as it looked at the markets for virtual words and generative artificial intelligence.

The commission, which is the executive arm of EU, said in January that it is “looking into some of the agreements that have been concluded between large digital market players and generative AI developers and providers” and singled out the Microsoft-OpenAI tie-up as a particular deal that it will be studying.

9To5Mac reported: Just eight days after it was revealed that Apple Fellow Phil Schiller would join the OpenAI board as an observer, it’s now being reported that this won’t happen.

Instead, OpenAI will simply commit to regular meetings with Schiller and other partners and investors…

The change of plan appears to relate to antitrust concerns. Regulators in both the U.S. and Europe are already investigating Microsoft’s investment OpenAI, and it was possible that Apple could have opened itself up to a similar investigation by taking a seat on the board, even without voting powers.

In my opinion, OpenAI needs to rethink if they really want a board of people from larger corporations involved in what OpenAI does. Microsoft and Apple seem to not want to have a seat on the board.

IIya Sutskever, OpenAI’s Former Chief Scientist, Launches New AI Company

AI,

IIya Sutskever, one of OpenAI’s co-founders, has launched a new company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just one month after formerly leaving OpenAI, TechCrunch reported.

Sutskever, who was OpenAI’s longtime chief scientist, founded SSI with former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross and ex-OpenAI engineer Daniel Levy.

At OpenAI, Sutskever was intregral to the company’s efforts to improve AI safety with the rise of AI systems “superintelligent”AI systems, an area he worked on alongside Jan Leake, who co-led OpenAI’s Superalignment team. Yet both Sutskever and then Leigh left the company dramatically in May after falling out with leadership at OpenAI over how to approach AI safety. Leike now heads a team at rival AI shop Anthropic.

Sutskiver has been shining a light on the thornier aspects of AI safety for a long time now. In a blog post published in 2023, Sutskever, writing with Leike, predicted that AI with intelligence exceeding that of humans could arrive within the decade — and that when it does, it won’t necessarily be benevolent, necessitating research into ways to control and restrict it.

Iyla Sutskiever, Daniel Gross, and Daniel Levy posted  the following on June 19, 2024:

Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Building safe super intelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our time.

We have started the world’s first straight-shot SSI lab, with one goal and one product: a safe super intelligence.

It is called Safe Superintelligence Inc.

SSI is our mission, our name, and our entire product roadmap, because it is our sole focus. Our team, investors, and business model are all aligned to achieve SSI.

We approach safety and capabilities in tandem, as technical problems to be solved through revolutionary engineering and scientific breakthroughs. We plan to advance capabilities as fast as possible while making sure our safety always remains ahead.

This way, we can scale in peace.

Our singular focus means no distraction by management overhead or product cycles, and our business model means safety, security, and progress are all insulated from short-term commercial pressures.

We are an American company with offices in Palo Alto and Tel Aviv, where we have deep roots and the ability to recruit top technical talent.

We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.

If that’s you, we offer an opportunity to do your life’s work and help solve the most important technical challenge of our age.

Now is the time. Join us.

The Verge reported: Last year, Sutskever led the push to oust OpenAI Sam Altman. Sutskever left OpenAI in May and hinted at the start of a new project. Shortly after Sutskever’s departure, AI researcher Jan Leike announced his resignation from OpenAI, citing safety processes that have “taken a backseat to shiny products.” Gretchen Krueger, a policy researcher at OpenAI, also mentioned safety concerns when announcing her departure.

In my opinion, it sounds like some of the people who were working on OpenAI have decided to create an entirely new company. Whether that decision was done out of frustration, or because they wanted to branch out on their own, it appears they are looking for other people to join them.