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- 2nd OpenAI Exodus Amidst Major Updates, I/O Recap, 14 New LLMs
2nd OpenAI Exodus Amidst Major Updates, I/O Recap, 14 New LLMs
Also, Sutskever goes to Russia and OpenAI copies Scarlett Johansson's voice?
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Key Takeaways
Google announced various Gemini and Gemma updates, along with a new energy efficient TPU called Trillium at I/O 2024.
OpenAI released GPT-4o, which offers improved performance over its predecessor but key members, including Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, have departed from the company, leaving the Superalignment team in a freefall.
OpenAI encountered several other controversies. The voice assistant, Sky, was scrubbed for striking resemblance to the voice of Scarlett Johansson. Additionally, Sam Altman faced significant scrutiny regarding vested equity clawbacks.
Various other models were released, including Falcon-2 (multimodal), CuMo (trained for specific language and vision tasks), and Fugaku-LLM (specialized in Japanese language processing)
Researchers from the National University of Singapore released a paper determining if SSM (Selective Space State Model; used to help AI better understand and process visual information) is necessary for vision tasks.
Meta released a new multimodal model called Chameleon that outperformed larger models and achieved impressive results on benchmarks like BoolQ.
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Rumours of the Day: Sutskever â Russia, Johansson: OpenAI copied 'Her' voice, OpenAI Cancels Equity?
Co-founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever left the company. This development may be unexpected, but in retrospect, it appears logical given that he has not been seen at the office for the past six months, following his brief involvement in the rebellion against Sam Altman. It is now speculated that the scientist is in discussions with Sberbank, one of the largest banks in Russia, regarding a potential move to Russia to embark on an âambitious projectâ.
OpenAI's AI voice called "Sky" that demonstrated in recent GPT-4o demo bears a striking resemblance to the voice of actress Scarlett Johansson.
Altman didn't help by further leaning into it on social media.
Despite OpenAI's assertion that Sky's voice is not Johansson's but rather that of a different paid voice actress, they have temporarily suspended the use of Sky to as they address inquiries regarding their voice selection and sampling methods. Notably, the actress has been allegedly approached by Altman's team on multiple occasions on the topic of such collaboration.
Lastly, the high-profile departures brought OpenAI's exit agreements to the spotlight. Turns out, they contained a non-disparagement clause that threatened to cancel vested equity for former employees who criticized the company, as reported by Vox. CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the existence of this clause and stated that while âOpenAI never enforced it or clawed back anyone's vested equityâ, he was unaware of the provision and found it embarrassing.
SF Exclusive Meetup on 5/28: How to Build a RAG Data Engine with LlamaIndex, Activeloop, & TryoLabs
Learn how we fine-tuned Llama-v-3 (8B) and used advanced retrieval techniques like Deep Memory by Activeloop with RAG to surpass GPT-4 in knowledge retrieval. Also, learn to take LLM-based apps to production with Tryolabs and prevent most common mistakes in prod with LlamaIndex.
We have a few last spots for the meetup at LlamaIndexâs swanky new HQ. So, get on the waitlist since the spots are limited!
The Latest AI News
Boy, what a week. We counted 14 new LLMs, but we may not have caught everything (let me know in replies if we did)! Google and OpenAI led the charge in AI announcements last week, with Google introducing various Gemini and Gemma updates while OpenAI announced its latest model called GPT-4o.
Some other notable model releases include Falcon-2, CuMo, and Fugaku-LLM.