AI Consolidates Even More, The Misleading Risks of AI, & More

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TLDR;

Technology:

🤨 OpenAI top executives leave and delays GPT-5

🧐 AI existential threats are massively exaggerated

😍 Google’s Gemma2 2B is a Titan

AI Hardware markets&venture:

🤫 Groq’s insane Series D $650 million round is a message to Nvidia

📉 Will Intel Survive this?

AI General markets&venture:

🥵 Character.ai just showed us the crude reality of AI

💥 Are the markets imploding?

TECHNOLOGY

OpenAI Loses 3 Top Executives in a day, also decreases expectations on GPT-5

Photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash

In a single day, OpenAI has seen how three top executives have left the company and also has had to contain the excitement on releasing the next model, which will not be released on this year’s DevDay in October, almost guaranteeing a delay until 2025.

Among the departing figures, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman’s right-hand man and company president, will take a sabbatical leave for the rest of 2025. Additionally, John Schulman, a co-founder, will, surprisingly, join Anthropic. The other executive who left was Product Lead Peter Deng.

TheWhiteBox’s take:

Out of all three departures, Schulman is by far the most concerning. Leaving a company you founded to join its biggest rival to “deepen my focus on superalignment” is a rather clear way of saying that OpenAI is no longer focusing on safety, and I’m leaving the boat.

This was the same argument Jan Leike made; the previous superalignment lead at the firm joined Anthropic, too, although in his case, he was much more clear on the motives.

OpenAI seems to be on a never-ending spree of bad PR stunts, becoming the industry’s ugly duckling. Adding insult to injury, they are no longer the ones leading the charge, as Google, Meta, and Anthropic have all created models that, at the very least, match OpenAI’s model prowess.

At the same time, they seem to be burning cash like there’s no tomorrow, with The Information estimating that value to be $5 billion for 2024, according to sources.

And the cherry on top? Elon Musk just announced yesterday another lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI, accusing him and the man who just went on a sabbatical of lying to him about their true intentions (making a profit instead of building AGI). Let’s not forget that Elon Musk is an OpenAI founder and that this company was indeed constituted as a non-profit, which is clearly no longer the case.

Regarding GPT-5, this delay is no surprise, as Mira Murati mentioned a few months ago. For whatever reason, people thought GPT-5 was coming out soon, which is, of course, not going to happen.

AI existential threats are massively exaggerated

This is a highly interesting and easy-to-read article by the newsletter Snake Oil. It argues that the x-risk threats that AI allegedly represents for society stand on very shaky evidence (if any), to the point that, in most cases, they are just guesses.

TheWhiteBox’s take:

Time after time, researchers have proven that most x-risks…

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