AI Reading for Thursday October 3
OpenAI's investors include Silicon Valley's most prolific bubble chasers, likd Son, Wood, and Tiger Global. Is that bad? - Business Insider
OpenAI asks investors not to back rivals such as Elon Musk’s xAI. - FT
Normally VCs would get board seats, inside info and it would be a conflict to do same for xAI. But you wouldn't pre-commit to not backing competitors, you would just know you lose access to OpenAI if you do. See Sequoia/a16z/Sutskever. You would certainly not sign anything preventing you from working with competitors.
Might have been why Apple backed out, they might want to buy an AI company at some point. Or just too much drama, their strategy for now seems to be that foundation models will be increasingly a commodity.
Comparing Anthropic and OpenAI revenue, Anthropic is not too far behind OpenAI on API revenue, OpenAI has way more people paying the $20/month subs. - Tanay’s Newsletter
OpenAI's chairman says AI is in a bubble — but one that could be wildly lucrative (for some?). - Business Insider
OpenAI feels the heat from competitors. - FT
Report that more OpenAI employees are talking to recruiters and looking to jump ship. - Business Insider
The 2 big questions are 1) whether OpenAI can build a real moat, Gemini and Claude are not significantly less effective for most purposes. Open source is also catching up, most people won’t implement AI that way but the option limits pricing power. And 2) whether they can continue being the innovation leader, a lot of the best people seem to distrust Altman and prefer working at Anthropic which is very odd and not good at all.
2 Harvard Students Put Facial Recognition Tech onto Meta's Smart Glasses to Instantly Dox Strangers. - 404 Media
Fear of AI automation is at the heart of the dockworkers strike - Business Insider
How to use ChatGPT to write code: What it does well, and what it doesn't. - ZDNET
Poolside raises $500m for mysterious coding assistant. Ex GitHub founder, major VCs in the round. I guess we doin' $500m class A rounds on no shipped product now, let alone product-market fit. - Bloomberg
Asking it to demo making Snake as mentioned is not even a bit meaningful since that will be in the training set. I’m sure the well-heeled VCs did their due diligence though?
Right now any AI that claims to write a whole app from scratch is cherry-picked, or trained on code examples of that specific app.
More on the Pear kerfluffle. - Indie Hackers
Some guy went so far as to make an app that automates grabbing someone's repo, renaming files and changing references to the original project and authors, and slapping a proprietary license on it. Maybe YC will fund them?
London newspaper prints a review of a Van Gogh exhibition by a dead reviewer using AI. - phys.org
Nvidia says it will train 30,000 Accenture consultants in Nvidia-centric agent-building unit. - CNBC
I’m not sure if Nvidia has some new agentic framework to compete with e.g. LangChain and Crew.ai, I don’t think they are going to train consultants to write Cuda code.
This is What Happens When Two (British) AI Models Go on a Date. - Geeky Gadgets
Christine Lagarde talks about AI with Jon Stewart (can skip to 14:00) - YouTube
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