TOGETHER WITH

Good morning, human brains. Welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• Sam Altman’s glorious return to OpenAI 🤯 🔥

  TLDR: the CEO was fired, chaos ensued, and now he’s back.

• Microsoft’s open-sourced its peewee powerhouse 🐜 👌

  It’s a small language model that outperforms models 5-10x its size.

• Is Amazon Santa, Scrooge, or a little of both? 🎅🏻 💸

  It launched its initiative to train 2 million people in AI for free by 2025.

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MAIN COURSE

Sam Altman is back, baby 🤯 🎉

It appears the roller coaster is over, folks. 🎢

On Monday, we covered OpenAI firing Sam Altman, the CEO. The chief Technology Officer, Mira Murati, was appointed interim CEO. Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s President, immediately resigned as well.

Investors and customers panicked.

Then, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and 95% of OpenAI’s employees agreed to leave and work at an AI research unit at Microsoft.

Then, all was quiet for about a day… 🤫

Click here for the entire play-by-play recap.

Then, this morning, OpenAI announced that Sam Altman was returning as the CEO.

It also stated that the board responsible for firing him was out, and a new board will take its place.

Whoa. Did Sam Altman say anything?

You bet.

Five minutes later, he responded with this tweet:

So, Microsoft is cool with this?

Totally. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, responded to Sam with this Tweet:

So now, we can breathe a sigh of relief?

It appears so.

To tie it in a nice little bow, Greg Brockman posted this selfie with the OpenAI team.

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SIDE SALAD

Microsoft’s adorable little AI model 🐜 👌

Who could forget? On Monday, we covered OpenAI firing Sam Altman and all the chaos that ensued.

Spoiler alert: Microsoft came out on top.

Without skipping a beat, Microsoft released Orca 2. It open-sourced its small language model that improves upon its 13 billion parameter language model, Orca.

Why would I care?

Well, despite its small size, it matches and even surpasses some much larger language models.

In tests, Orca 2 outperformed and matched models 5 to 10 times its size in tasks like language understanding, problem-solving, and more.

So it’s tiny but mighty?

Indeed.

It comes in 7 billion and 13 billion parameter sizes and outperforms similarly sized models in common sense reasoning, complex math problems, and more.

Sounds too good to be true. What’s wrong with it?

Eh, a couple of things.

Orca 2 inherited limitations from its base model, LLaMA-2. These limitations include heavy computational requirements, long training time, bias, and more.

It also hasn’t been tuned for safety yet, and it’s too early to draw any real conclusions from it.

While Microsoft highlights the features where it performs particularly well in this article and in its paper, it hasn’t been around long enough for full testing.

Click here to read Orca 2’s paper.

A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA

Will Amazon be on Santa’s nice list? 🎅🏻 💸

In September, we covered Amazon and Anthropic’s $4 billion collaboration. Amazon invested the money in exchange for 49% of Anthropic’s company.

In October, we reported on Amazon and IBM’s partnership expansion. They claimed it was to advanced AI solutions and bring more efficient supply chain processes to businesses.

Did Amazon partner with someone else?

Actually, nope.

On Monday, Amazon launched its “AI Ready” initiative. It claims the goal is to train 2 million people in AI skills for free by 2025.

Why?

According to an AWS survey, 73% of employers prioritize hiring AI professionals, yet 75% struggle to find qualified candidates.

Amazon says the program intends to make AI education accessible, removing cost as a barrier for those interested in learning AI.

That’s nice, I guess. How will they do this?

The program will offer 8 free AI and generative AI courses through AWS Educate and AWS Skill Builder.

It will also give 50,000 high school and university students around the globe scholarships for a generative AI course that focuses on foundational AI skills.

That’s suspiciously nice…

It gets even better.

Amazon partnered with Code.org to introduce the Hour of Code Dance Party: AI Edition, which blends music and coding for an engaging AI learning experience.

This initiative particularly aims to reach students from underserved and underrepresented communities.

MEMES FOR DESSERT

Ilya Sutskever was instrumental in the board’s decision to fire Sam Altman. As a result, he’s the butt of many memes lately.

For a play-by-play recap. Click here.

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Tools

Musicfy’s Voice to Music — turns any audio into many different instruments.

Postnitro — AI-powered tool to quickly create social media carousels.

Negotiation Coach — A GPT to practice your negotiation skills. Also provide visual summaries, graphs, and more.

ChatDesigner.ai — AI-powered image creator/editor with an intuitive conversational interface.

Think Pieces

China formed the NDA. The National Data Association’s goal is to centralize data control and promote cross-border data circulation.

Microsoft’s shares reach a record high. It happened as a direct result of Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, and others being hired by Microsoft.

How South African university students are using AI. It helps them learn and isn’t used to avoid work.

Startup News

Stability introduced Stable Video Diffusion. It’s a video generation model that’s based on its popular Stable Diffusion.

Amazon fires hundreds of employees. It claims it fired some working on Alexa to prioritize its generative AI capabilities.

Google’s ex-CEO and other billionaires invest in “kyutai.” They invested $300 million in the AI research nonprofit.

Research

Testing LMAs (Language Model Agents) — a framework to test LMAs in real-world situations safely.

MetaDreamer — quickly creates high-quality 3D models from text prompts.

Rethinking Attention — a study on replacing Transformers’ attention mechanisms with feed-forward networks.

TWEET OF THE DAY

Elon Musk’s (not so) tasteful tweet about OpenAI’s recent debacle. This was before Sam Altman’s return as CEO.

Click here for more info.

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AI ART-SHOW

Until next time 🤖😋🧠