Taryn Plumb VentureBeat Carl Franzen Financial Times Jackie Davalos Bloomberg Steven Levy WIRED The Information AI giants are in a race to secure massive amounts of data to train their models, pushing ethical boundaries in the process. The lengths they'll go to are eye-opening. With reporting from@katielpaul and Anna Tong at Reuters: reuters.com/technology/ins…

Tokyo-based Sakana AI, founded Transformers paper author Llion Jones and fellow Google Brain researcher hardmaru, is using evolution-inspired techniques to “breed” multiple generations of LLMs: reuters.com/technology/ope…

Reddit’s first AI content training deal is with Google. At $60 million a year, deals like this could be a very lucrative income stream for the social media company. Reddit’s S1 could go public as early as tmrw (2/22) reuters.com/technology/red…

Peter Thiel's Founders Fund had a crypto bet from 2014 to 2022 that made $1.8 bln in returns.

Quietly, they're back in the market, pouring $200 million in $BTC $ETH in mid-2023, sources told Anna Tong & me.

Are VCs back at crypto/token investments?
bit.ly/3OGlmBO

He's back in!! Billionaire Peter Thiel's Founders Fund liquidated its all its crypto positions in 2022, but now they're back in a big way, with a $200 million monster bet on $BTC and $ETH, which they stealthily bought last year. reuters.com/technology/pet…

San Francisco-based Unity software, maker of the eponymous Unity game engine popular with game developers, intends to lay off 25% of its staff (1,800 people) in its biggest workforce reduction to date. reuters.com/technology/uni…

A new mysterious entrant in the SF local media scene: Gazetteer San Francisco, 'a soon-to-launch local news website.' They're hiring politics, biz and food reporters. talkingbiznews.com/tag/gazetteer-… The San Francisco Standard San Francisco Chronicle

This past fall, a group of senior leaders approached the board of OpenAI with concerns about CEO Sam Altman. They described Altman as psychologically abusive, creating pockets of chaos and delays at the AI start-up — complaints that were a major factor in the board’s abrupt…

Updated our story with a little more info about the “AI scientist” team at OpenAI: reuters.com/technology/sam…

It's called Q* (pronounced Q-star) Exclusive: Sam Altman's ouster at OpenAI was precipitated by letter to board about AI breakthrough -sources reuters.com/technology/sam… by Anna Tong Jeffrey Dastin @krystal

Exclusive: Sam Altman's ouster at OpenAI was precipitated by letter to board about an AI breakthrough, the Q* algorithm, which some researchers believe will lead OpenAI to be the path to AGI. reuters.com/technology/sam…

We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo.

We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

New: some OpenAI investors are considering legal action including suing the board after Sam Altman's abrupt firing: reuters.com/technology/ope…

Over 500 out of 700 employees at OpenAI have signed the letter to threaten to quit to join MSFT unless the board resign, alleging the board “informed the leadership team that allowing the company to be destroyed ‘would be consistent with the mission.”

We remain committed to our partnership with OpenAI and have confidence in our product roadmap, our ability to continue to innovate with everything we announced at Microsoft Ignite, and in continuing to support our customers and partners. We look forward to getting to know Emmett…

Once the scourge of the classroom over cheating and plagiarism concerns, OpenAI now wants to be teacher's pet. They'll be starting a new team that will work with educators to get ChatGPT into schools, COO Brad Lightcap said. reuters.com/technology/ope…

SF on a Monday night post OpenAI dev day. I scored some e/acc swag!

For their first dev day, OpenAI transformed an industrial venue in a hard-hit part of SF into a midcentury modern oasis with plants and espresso, with vibes similar to their headquarters.