Microsoft becomes a board member of OpenAI, Google Drive unveils a new homepage to find files faster, while the mystery of the missing files remains unsolved and AI is still very dumb.
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These and more top tech stories on Hashtag Trending.
I’m your host James Roy.
Microsoft has finally joined the board of OpenAI, as a non-voting observer.
Microsoft is a 49 percent shareholder of Open’s AI’s for-profit subsidiary and its largest investor, having injected more than $10 billion this year since the start of 2023.
OpenAI made the announcement as it formalized the return of Sam Altman as CEO.
The company also thanked Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella for help resolving the conflict that – quick catch up – overthrew Altman, irked employees and partners, saw a couple of short-lived CEOs, regrets and finally the return of Altman, like nothing ever happened.
The reinstated CEO, says he harbors zero ill toward co-founder Ilya Sutskever, who voted to oust Altman and who has now exited the company’s board.
However, Altman said in an interview with Axios that he’d like to understand better why he was ousted in the first place.
With Microsoft joining the board, Altman also said that the “highest priority” is now to explore changes to improve the governance structure of the company – including whether OpenAI remains controlled by a non-profit entity.
Its subsidiary’s for-profit work is overseen by a non-profit board, under the company’s current structure, the goal being to ensure that AI benefits all of humanity.
The company has already said it will seek to diversify its board, which currently consists of former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor as chairman, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers and Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo.
The mystery of the missing Google Drive files is still rumbling, with Google acknowledging the issue yesterday and expecting the solution in the next two days.
In the meantime, the company is rolling out a new homepage that aims to make it easier and faster for you to find files.
Google Drive’s new “Home” view uses machine learning algorithms to automatically suggest files and folders, including ones you’ve recently opened, shared, or edited. It will also suggest any documents attached to upcoming Google Calendar events.
And, the homepage offers new filters or “search chips,” to search documents by type, people, modified date or location. Hope it works to retrieve the missing files too.
Google Drive’s Home view is now the default homepage. However, you can switch back to the old landing page by clicking on the “Change to My Drive” option in the banner.
Source: TechCrunch
Nucleos, a startup, is making e-learning tablets available to inmates in correctional facilities to help them prepare for life after release.
Co-founder and CEO Noah Freedman, said; “Without a solution like Nucleos, almost 95 per cent of digital e-learning and training material can’t be used in prisons or jails due to security reasons. What sets us apart is that we handle all security aspects, ensuring that all e-learning programs are delivered safely and securely. Simultaneously, we disable any components that could enable prohibited communication with the outside.”
The company does not make the education materials or the tablets but acts as a one-stop shop for making these things available to the facilities.
Nucleos also tracks the courses and credentials so the person can be ready to use them for job searchers after their release.
Source: TechCrunch
Onto the less gracious things. Elon Musk told advertisers leaving X over the antisemitic content proliferating on the platform to “Go, f- themselves”
He said during the appearance at The New York Times’ DealBook event, “If somebody is going to try and blackmail me with advertising, blackmail me with money? Go f- yourself. Is that clear? I hope it is.”
X came under fire with its management of the litany of antisemitic and islamophobic content on the platform amid the Israel-Hamas war. But advertisers mostly started pulling back after Elon Musk posted a tweet wherein he seemed to agree with an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Documents that The Times has seen reveal that over 100 brands, including Airbnb, IBM, Apple, Microsoft, Netflix and other types of advertisers such as political candidates have fully paused their ads on the platform, while dozens more are considering pulling their campaigns. X could lose up to $75 million in ad revenue earnings if advertisers do not come back.
The company said that the revenue at risk was only around $11 million as some advertisers return or increase their ad spending.
Source: Engadget
How intelligent is artificial intelligence? Turns out not very.
The potential of achieving artificial general intelligence in the near term has been making the rounds, but many AI scientists continue to maintain that AI does not come close to human capabilities.
According to recent research from Yann LeCun, Meta’s top AI scientist, AI is still much dumber than humans in the ways that matter most.
The study co-authored by scientists from other AI startups like HuggingFace and AutoGPT aimed to look at how AI’s general-purpose reasoning stacks up against the average human.
So, the research put together its own series of questions that, as the study describes, would be “conceptually simple for humans yet challenging for most advanced AIs.”
Answering the questions would require abilities like reasoning, multi-modality handling, web browsing, and generally tool-use proficiency. For instance, the LLM was asked to visit a specific website and answer a question specific to information on that site.
The questions were given to a sample of humans and to GPT-4, the latest large language model from OpenAI.
End result? The LLMs did not do very well and were outperformed by humans.
The study concluded that the advent of AGI would depend on the system’s capability to perform on such questions as robustly as a human does.
Source: Gizmodo
And that’s the top tech news for today.
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I’m your host James Roy. Have a Fantastic Friday!