The TLDR

Highlight: It’s been almost a year of ChatGPT in our lives, and this year has been an AI whirlwind. We took a look at some of the craziest headlines over the past 12 months. More below :)

Musing of the Week: There’s only one thing we could possibly talk about this week, and that is the drama at OpenAI. The OpenAI board fired Sam Altman on November 17, catalyzing a crazy chain of events. We won’t report the play-by-play, but we are taking a look at OpenAI’s unusual org structure.

⚠️ 12 Months of AI Hype

ChatGPT gets credit for pushing AI into the prosumer realm one year ago on November 30, 2022 and helping the average person dream about what is possible with user-friendly AI. This week, we’re taking a break from projects to look at the year in review.

November 2022

• OpenAI releases ChatGPT for public use

• Canva releases text-to-image AI

December 2022

• Lensa AI goes viral as the Internet goes crazy for its magic avatars

• Disney researchers present FRAN, a post-production tool that can de-age actors immediately

January 2023

• Getty Images sues Stable Diffusion for allegedly scraping millions of its images

• Buzzfeed announces that it will use OpenAI tools to personalize content

February 2023

• Google releases Bard, an AI chatbot powered by Transformer (Google’s proprietary neural network architecture)

• Microsoft releases BingChat, an AI chatbot powered by ChatGPT

• Notion releases Notion AI for everyone

March 2023

• Adobe releases Firefly in public beta

• Apple is rumored to be testing AI capabilities for Siri

• For less than $600, researchers at Stanford train an AI model that performs similarly to ChatGPT

• Goldman Sachs drops a report that claims AI could replace 300 million jobs

• Tech leaders pen an open letter that calls for a 6-month pause on the development of any models more powerful than GPT-4

• AI-generated photo of Pope Francis (swagged out in a Balenciaga puffer) goes viral

April 2023

• Runway launches a mobile app that offers video-to-video generation capabilities

• HuggingFace releases HuggingChat, a ChatGPT alternative

• AI-generated song using Drake and The Weeknd’s voices goes viral

• Stanford drops the Artificial Intelligence Index Report, 2023

May 2023

• American lawyer uses ChatGPT for legal research and cites hallucinated information in submitted brief

• Amazon ramps up work on an AI-powered conversational search experience

June 2023

• In a Bloomberg interview, Sam Altman states that no one person should be trusted and that the board has the ability to fire him

• ElevenLabs (voice generation AI) raises $19M

• CB Insights reports that 2023 investment into AI is already at $14.1 Billion across 86 deals

July 2023

• OpenAI’s GPT-4 becomes generally available to paying customers

• Daniel Ek (Spotify founder) raises $65M for preventative, AI-enabled full body scans

• Anthropic releases Claude 2, an AI chatbot

August 2023

• Tiktok asks creators to label AI-generated content, after previously banning AI content from the platform in 2020

• US court rules that AI-generated art cannot receive copyrights

• Youtube announces that it will partner with the music industry on responsible AI

September 2023

• Adobe releases Firefly for full commercial usage (post-beta)

• Jodi Picoult, John Grisham, and George R.R. Martin join other authors in suing OpenAI for ‘systematic theft on a mass scale’

October 2023

• President Biden issues Executive Order on managing the risks of AI

• The Information reports that Humane AI’s wearable smartphone replacement could cost $1,000

November 2023

• X releases Grok, a premium feature meant to compete with ChatGPT

• OpenAI board fires Sam Altman

🧠 Musing of the Week

This week, the AI world was shaken by the news of Sam Altman's ousting from OpenAI. Altman, a significant figure in the AI landscape and ex-president of Y-Combinator, has been leading OpenAI since 2019. On Friday, November 17th, the OpenAI board announced their abrupt decision to remove him from his role, citing his failure to be “consistently candid” with the board.

Sam Altman is now set to join Microsoft, heading a new AI research division, a move followed by Greg Brockman's resignation from OpenAI. Over 600 OpenAI employees have shown their support for Altman, threatening to jump ship to Microsoft unless their demands are met at OpenAI. Instead of speculating about the rapidly changing circumstances surrounding Altman’s exit, we thought this was a valuable opportunity to dig a bit into the strange structure of OpenAI that has no doubt contributed to the confusion of the past few days.

In 2015, OpenAI was founded as a 501(c)(3) non-profit by a coalition of investors and entrepreneurs, including Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and Ilya Sutskever. Elon Musk also served as co-chair alongside Altman in the organization’s early years. They started out with a billion dollars in pledged support from numerous individual and corporate donors, including Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, and Peter Thiel. Here’s their mission statement from their first public announcement:

Elon Musk left the group in 2018, citing a conflict of interest with his other companies. However, sources later reported that he exited after an unsuccessful takeover attempt. He took his funding with him and became a vocal critic of Sam Altman’s leadership. In 2019, OpenAI transitioned into a 'capped-profit' model that they claimed would allow them to attract more capital while maintaining a focus on their original goals. Soon after, they received an initial $1 billion dollar investment from Microsoft, which would swell to $13 billion in the following years.

OpenAI's shift to a 'capped-profit' model created a complex structure in which the original non-profit maintained majority control via shell companies, and Microsoft held a significant but minority stake. While aligning with OpenAI's ethos, this arrangement introduced an intricate web of executive complexity and potential conflicts between ethical AI development and expectations for investor returns. It’s easy to see how this could create issues.

More importantly, we agree with OpenAI that the creation of AGI (Applied General Intelligence) could be a monumental shift in many aspects of human life. Understanding the complex forces shaping this development will be important to understanding how it might be utilized in the future. As OpenAI tries to preserve corporate objectives while also operating for the public good, we find it valuable to scrutinize how these decisions are being made, since they will shape the deployment and governance of transformative technology.

🙌 If you’re hyped about the generative AI industry specifically, here are some of the coolest roles we’ve seen this week:

• Product Marketing Manager @ Skit.ai

• Head of Marketing @ Synthesis.ai

• Associate Business Manager @ Lincoln Lab, MIT

• Sales Operations & Enablement Lead @ Stability.ai

• Product Manager, Responsible AI @ Salesforce

🔨 Check out these other AI tools we’ve been looking at this week (creator edition):

• BottomRight: Custom-trained, context-aware AI chatbot

• Avoma: AI-generated conversation and action item summaries for your CRM

• Bubble: Not a new tool, but you can now build no-code tools with OpenAI functionality :)

That’s all for this week. See you next Tuesday!

Lorel & Reily