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Welcome, AI enthusiasts.
OpenAI’s former board member Helen Toner is finally speaking out — detailing the events that led up to Sam Altman’s ousting last month.
Her account sheds more light on the juicy drama, revealing a feud over a critical paper prompting a power struggle. Let’s investigate…
In today’s AI rundown:
Helen Toner speaks on Altman's firing
Grok begins rolling out to X Premium+ users
9 new AI tools to try
How to get inspired with AI visualizations
Meta unveils high-fidelity VR avatars
Inflection’s Pi chatbot comes to Android
Scientists build cyborg rescue bugs
Read time: 3 minutes
LATEST DEVELOPMENTS
OPENAI
Image source: Getty Images
The Rundown: OpenAI board member Helen Toner spoke out about the tense boardroom drama that saw her vote to oust CEO Sam Altman in a new interview with The Wall Street Journal.
The details:
Toner denies AI safety concerns drove Altman's firing, instead citing eroded trust.
The two had clashed prior to the firing over a paper she co-authored in October on AI safety, which Altman felt was too critical of OpenAI.
Altman supposedly tried swaying directors to remove her, with his allies publicly attacking her credentials and priorities.
Toner said she was surprised by employee loyalty to Altman but that OpenAI's duty isn't to his leadership but its mission of ‘ensuring AGI benefits all humanity’.
Why it matters: The behind-the-scenes drama from one of the wildest company situations in history continues to drip out. These details paint the feud as more of a power struggle than an existential crisis towards uncontrollable AI systems.
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XAI
Image source: xAI
The Rundown: Elon Musk just announced that xAI’s ChatGPT competitor Grok is officially rolling out to X Premium+ subscribers, unleashing the Twitter-trained uncensored chatbot to the public for the first time.
The details:
Grok is only rolling out to US-based Premium+ users for now.
Grok uses real-time data from Twitter/X to source responses, apparently even scraping our post for the latest AI news.
The edgy chatbot is positioned as an uncensored, ‘anti-woke,’ rebellious alternative to competitors — answering questions that would be avoided or refused by ChatGPT.
The release comes on the heels of a reported SEC filing that xAI is looking to raise up to $1B in investment.
The relevance: The real-time info access to Twitter/X sets Grok massively apart from the alternatives — but questions remain on how the team at xAI will filter out the disinformation/noise on the platform. More to come…
QUESTION OF THE DAY
Are you excited to try xAI's Grok chatbot?Vote below to see live results |
TRENDING TOOLS
✨ Gemini- Google's answer to GPT-4 (link)
🤖 GPT Wrapped- ChatGPT year in review recaps your usage in 2023 (link)
💰 Payback- GPT-4 Vision enabled expense tracker (link)
📝 AI Applicant Sorting- Chat-powered assistant to help you review resumes 10x faster (link)
✍ Strut AI- All-in-one AI workspace designed for writers (link)
🚨 Openlayer- Slack or email alerts for when your AI fails (link)
🎬 Animaker AI- The future of AI animations starts here (link)
📆 Vimcal- Calendar app on steroids. Assists users in scheduling and organizing events efficiently (link)
💬 Chatbase- Create a ChatGPT-like chatbot widget for your website (link)
Browse the most popular tools ever featured with our tool database.
AI TRAINING
Need some extra motivation or inspiration as we inch closer to the new year?
Here's an incredibly simple yet powerful way to envision and manifest your ideal future self in 2024 — courtesy of Jodie Cook:
Open ChatGPT and type the following prompt:
"Generate an inspirational landscape image depicting my ideal future self from behind, wearing [insert clothing], [insert action like working, relaxing etc.], and situated in [describe ideal location like apartment, office etc.]"
Save the image as your desktop background, using it as inspiration to help visualize your ideal reality!
QUICK HITS
Inflection just announced that its personal AI chatbot Pi is now available for Android users in the Google Play store. The supportive companion was also recently upgraded to Inflection-2, which the company hails as a more capable model with ‘dramatically improved reasoning’.
Researchers at Meta just released a new update to its Codec Avatars, using 3D Gaussian Splatting to produce lifelike animated faces with incredible detail. By using this tech, we’ll soon be able to talk to someone seemingly across the table from us, who can be miles away in reality.
Is the world ready for AI bugs? Researchers are now creating bio-hybrid robot cockroaches — melding living tissues like muscles into android bodies. These cyborg cockroaches with sensors could soon be ‘the future of earthquake search and rescue’.
Browse all available AI job positions with our job board.
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THAT’S A WRAP
That’s it for today’s news in the world of AI!
If you have anything interesting to share, please reach out to us by sending us a DM on Twitter: @rowancheung & @therundownai
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