AI experts don’t stay jobless for long, as evidenced by Microsoft’s quick recruitment of former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Co-Founder Greg Brockman.

Altman, who was recently ousted by OpenAI’s board for reasons that have had no shortage of speculation, has found a new home at Microsoft. The announcement came after unsuccessful negotiations with OpenAI’s board to reinstate Altman.

I deeply regret my participation in the board's actions. I never intended to harm OpenAI. I love everything we've built together and I will do everything I can to reunite the company.

— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) November 20, 2023

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella – who has long expressed confidence in Altman’s vision and leadership – revealed that Altman and Brockman will lead Microsoft’s newly established advanced AI research team.

Nadella expressed excitement about the collaboration, stating, “We’re extremely excited to share the news that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, together with colleagues, will be joining Microsoft to lead a new advanced AI research team. We look forward to moving quickly to provide them with the resources needed for their success.”

I’m super excited to have you join as CEO of this new group, Sam, setting a new pace for innovation. We’ve learned a lot over the years about how to give founders and innovators space to build independent identities and cultures within Microsoft, including GitHub, Mojang Studios,…

— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) November 20, 2023

The move follows Altman’s abrupt departure from OpenAI. Former Twitch CEO Emmett Shear has been appointed as interim CEO at OpenAI.

Today I got a call inviting me to consider a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity: to become the interim CEO of @OpenAI. After consulting with my family and reflecting on it for just a few hours, I accepted. I had recently resigned from my role as CEO of Twitch due to the birth of my…

— Emmett Shear (@eshear) November 20, 2023

Altman’s role at Microsoft is anticipated to build on the company’s strategy of allowing founders and innovators space to create independent identities, similar to Microsoft’s approach with GitHub, Mojang Studios, and LinkedIn.

Microsoft’s decision to bring Altman and Brockman on board coincides with the development of its custom AI chip. The Maia AI chip, designed to train large language models, aims to reduce dependence on Nvidia.

While Microsoft reassures its commitment to the OpenAI partnership, valued at approximately $10 billion, it emphasises ongoing innovation and support for customers and partners.

As Altman and Brockman embark on leading Microsoft’s advanced AI research team, the industry will be watching closely to see what the high-profile figures can do with Microsoft’s resources at their disposal. The industry will also be observing whether OpenAI can maintain its success under different leadership.

(Photo by Turag Photography on Unsplash)

See also: Amdocs, NVIDIA and Microsoft Azure build custom LLMs for telcos

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Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI, has been removed from his position as CEO and director by the company's board. OpenAI, now worth about $80 billion, cited a failure to be "consistently candid in his communications." Altman is credited with convincing Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to commit $10 billion to the company and leading the company's tender offer transactions this year that fueled a nearly three-fold valuation bump from $29 billion to over $80 billion. His departure leaves a significant gap in the company's fundraising efforts. Despite concerns about the potential misuse of AI technology, Altman has previously stated that "heavy regulation" wasn't needed for some time.

OpenAI has been grappling with a series of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks targeting its API and ChatGPT services over the past 24 hours.

While the company has not yet disclosed specific details about the source of these attacks, OpenAI acknowledged that they are dealing with “periodic outages due to an abnormal traffic pattern reflective of a DDoS attack.”

Users affected by these incidents reported encountering errors such as “something seems to have gone wrong” and “There was an error generating a response” when accessing ChatGPT.

This recent wave of attacks follows a major outage that impacted ChatGPT and its API on Wednesday, along with partial ChatGPT outages on Tuesday, and elevated error rates in Dall-E on Monday.

OpenAI displayed a banner across ChatGPT’s interface, attributing the disruptions to “exceptionally high demand” and reassuring users that efforts were underway to scale their systems.

Threat actor group Anonymous Sudan has claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks on OpenAI. According to the group, the attacks are in response to OpenAI’s perceived bias towards Israel and against Palestine.

The attackers utilised the SkyNet botnet, which recently incorporated support for application layer attacks or Layer 7 (L7) DDoS attacks. In Layer 7 attacks, threat actors overwhelm services at the application level with a massive volume of requests to strain the targets’ server and network resources.

Brad Freeman, Director of Technology at SenseOn, commented:

“Distributed denial of service attacks are internet vandalism. Low effort, complexity, and in most cases more of a nuisance than a long-term threat to a business. Often DDOS attacks target services with high volumes of traffic which can be ’off-ramped, by their cloud or Internet service provider.

However, as the attacks are on Layer 7 they will be targeting the application itself, therefore OpenAI will need to make some changes to mitigate the attack. It’s likely the threat actor is sending complex queries to OpenAI to overload it, I wonder if they are using AI-generated content to attack AI content generation.”

However, the attribution of these attacks to Anonymous Sudan has raised suspicions among cybersecurity researchers. Some experts suggest that this could be a false flag operation and the group might have connections to Russia instead which, along with Iran, is suspected of stoking the bloodshed and international outrage to benefit its domestic interests.

The situation once again highlights the ongoing challenges faced by organisations dealing with DDoS attacks and the complexities of accurately identifying the perpetrators.

(Photo by Johann Walter Bantz on Unsplash)

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OpenAI has announced a slew of new additions and improvements to its platform, alongside reduced pricing, aimed at empowering developers and enhancing user experience.

Following yesterday’s leak of a custom GPT-4 chatbot creator, OpenAI unveiled several other key features during its DevDay that promise a transformative impact on the landscape of AI applications:

• GPT-4 Turbo: OpenAI introduced the preview of GPT-4 Turbo, the next generation of its renowned language model. This new iteration boasts enhanced capabilities and an extensive knowledge base encompassing world events up until April 2023.
  • One of GPT-4 Turbo’s standout features is the impressive 128K context window, allowing it to process the equivalent of more than 300 pages of text in a single prompt.
  • Notably, OpenAI has optimised the pricing structure, making GPT-4 Turbo 3x cheaper for input tokens and 2x cheaper for output tokens compared to its predecessor.
• Assistants API: OpenAI also unveiled the Assistants API, a tool designed to simplify the process of building agent-like experiences within applications.
  • The API equips developers with the ability to create purpose-built AIs with specific instructions, leveraging additional knowledge and calling models and tools to perform tasks.
• Multimodal capabilities: OpenAI’s platform now supports a range of multimodal capabilities, including vision, image creation (DALL·E 3), and text-to-speech (TTS).
  • GPT-4 Turbo can process images, opening up possibilities such as generating captions, detailed image analysis, and reading documents with figures.
  • Additionally, DALL·E 3 integration allows developers to create images and designs programmatically, while the text-to-speech API enables the generation of human-quality speech from text.
• Pricing overhaul: OpenAI has significantly reduced prices across its platform, making it more accessible to developers.
  • GPT-4 Turbo input tokens are now 3x cheaper than its predecessor at $0.01, and output tokens are 2x cheaper at $0.03. Similar reductions apply to GPT-3.5 Turbo, catering to various user requirements and ensuring affordability.
• Copyright Shield: To bolster customer protection, OpenAI has introduced Copyright Shield.
  • This initiative sees OpenAI stepping in to defend customers and cover the associated legal costs if they face copyright infringement claims related to the generally available features of ChatGPT Enterprise and the developer platform.

OpenAI’s latest announcements mark a significant stride in the company’s mission to democratise AI technology, empowering developers to create innovative and intelligent applications across various domains.

See also: OpenAI set to unveil custom GPT-4 chatbot creator

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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As OpenAI gears up for its inaugural developer conference, some major announcements appear to have leaked.

The leak includes screenshots and videos showcasing a custom chatbot creator utilising GPT-4. This advanced version of ChatGPT boasts features such as web browsing and data analysis, enhancing its capabilities significantly.

According to the leaked information, OpenAI will introduce a new marketplace where users can share their custom chatbots or explore creations made by others.

The leaker, a Twitter user named CHOI, provided a summary of the anticipated updates:

More than 90% rumors:
– Gizmo announcement.
– Features:
* Sandbox – Provides an environment to import, test, and modify existing chatbots.
* Custom Actions – Define additional functionality for your chatbot using OpenAPI specifications
* Knowledge… pic.twitter.com/XB1FYgliLE

— CHOI (@arrakis_ai) November 2, 2023

Additionally, SEO tools developer Tibor Blaho shared a video demonstrating the user interface of the new feature—revealing a GPT Builder option that enables users to input prompts and create bespoke chatbots.

The GPT Builder interface offers a user-friendly experience, allowing individuals to select a default language, tone, and writing style for their chatbot. Users can configure the bot by providing a name, description, and instructions, along with the ability to upload files for a personalised knowledgebase.

The tool also allows toggling of features such as web browsing and image generation; giving users unprecedented control over their chatbot’s capabilities. Custom actions can be added to enhance the bot’s functionality.

Here is a short video preview of the new ChatGPT Prototype – Gizmo V8.

The feature previously known as "Magic Maker" for creating new GPTs is now called "GPT Builder".

It seems that the "Welcome Message" has been removed, and GPT Builder can now also generate profile pictures… pic.twitter.com/Rfbl8dIXvX

— Tibor Blaho (@btibor91) November 5, 2023

Furthermore, the leaked information suggests that OpenAI plans to launch an enterprise-level “Team” subscription plan with both “Flexible” and “Annual” options.

The Team plan reportedly offers benefits such as unlimited high-speed GPT-4 usage and extended context capabilities, with a pricing structure of $25 per user, per month for the annual subscription and $30 per month for the non-annual option, requiring a minimum of three users.

OpenAI has recently rolled out several beta features for ChatGPT, including live web results, image generation, and voice chat.

The company is set to provide a preview of the new tools at the upcoming developer conference, offering the tech community a firsthand look at the future of conversational AI.

(Photo by Jem Sahagun on Unsplash)

See also: NIST announces AI consortium to shape US policies

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OpenAI, the company behind the renowned ChatGPT, is reportedly delving into the prospect of manufacturing processing chips in-house amidst a worldwide shortage of these in-demand components.

Sources familiar with the matter disclosed to Reuters that OpenAI is actively exploring options, including evaluating an undisclosed company for potential acquisition to bolster its AI chip-making ambitions.

The shortage of chips, a fundamental component in AI technology, has prompted OpenAI to consider various strategies. These options include internal chip production, forging closer ties with its primary chip supplier NVIDIA, and diversifying its chip providers.

Earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman voiced his concerns about the chip scarcity—resulting in delays to the company’s projects.

In a since-deleted blog post by Humanloop CEO Raza Habib, the AI expert wrote about his experience sitting down with Altman:

“A common theme that came up throughout the discussion was that currently OpenAI is extremely GPU-limited and this is delaying a lot of their short-term plans. The biggest customer complaint was about the reliability and speed of the API.

Sam acknowledged their concern and explained that most of the issue was a result of GPU shortages.The longer 32k context can’t yet be rolled out to more people. OpenAI haven’t overcome the O(n^2) scaling of attention and so whilst it seemed plausible they would have 100k – 1M token context windows soon (this year) anything bigger would require a research breakthrough.

The finetuning API is also currently bottlenecked by GPU availability. They don’t yet use efficient finetuning methods like Adapters or LoRa and so finetuning is very compute-intensive to run and manage.

Better support for finetuning will come in the future. They may even host a marketplace of community contributed models. Dedicated capacity offering is limited by GPU availability.”

If OpenAI proceeds with its plan to manufacture its own chips, it will join the ranks of industry giants like Google and Amazon who have already transitioned to in-house chip production. This move could potentially alleviate OpenAI’s dependency on external suppliers, empowering the company to meet the escalating demand for specialised AI chips.

Since the public launch of ChatGPT in November last year, the demand for specialised AI chips has skyrocketed—causing a surge in NVIDIA’s share prices as companies rush to procure the desirable hardware.

OpenAI has not made a final decision regarding the acquisition or in-house chip production, and discussions are ongoing to address the pressing chip shortage and sustain the company’s AI initiatives.

(Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash)

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OpenAI has announced DALL-E 3, the third iteration of its acclaimed text-to-image model. 

DALL-E 3 promises significant enhancements over its predecessors and introduces seamless integration with ChatGPT.

One of the standout features of DALL-E 3 is its ability to better understand and interpret user intentions when confronted with detailed and lengthy prompts:

"A middle-aged woman of Asian descent, her dark hair streaked with silver, appears fractured and splintered, intricately embedded within a sea of broken porcelain. The porcelain glistens with splatter paint patterns in a harmonious blend of glossy and matte blues, greens,… pic.twitter.com/QryQz0BtxB

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 20, 2023

Even if a user struggles to articulate their vision precisely, ChatGPT can step in to assist in crafting comprehensive prompts.

DALL-E 3 has been engineered to excel in creating elements that its predecessors and other AI generators have historically struggled with, such as rendering intricate depictions of hands and incorporating text into images:

"An illustration of a human heart made of translucent glass, standing on a pedestal amidst a stormy sea. Rays of sunlight pierce the clouds, illuminating the heart, revealing a tiny universe within. The quote 'Find the universe within you' is etched in bold letters across the… pic.twitter.com/S3cKMkG67T

— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 20, 2023

OpenAI has also implemented robust security measures, ensuring the AI system refrains from generating explicit or offensive content by identifying and ignoring certain keywords in prompts.

Beyond technical advancements, OpenAI has taken steps to mitigate potential legal issues. 

While the current DALL-E version can mimic the styles of living artists, the forthcoming DALL-E 3 has been designed to decline requests to replicate their copyrighted works. Artists will also have the option to submit their original creations through a dedicated form on the OpenAI website, allowing them to request removal if necessary.

OpenAI’s rollout plan for DALL-E 3 involves an initial release to ChatGPT ‘Plus’ and ‘Enterprise’ customers next month. The enhanced image generator will then become available to OpenAI’s research labs and API customers in the upcoming fall season.

As OpenAI continues to push the boundaries of AI technology, DALL-E 3 represents a major step forward in text-to-image generation.

(Image Credit: OpenAI)

See also: Stability AI unveils ‘Stable Audio’ model for controllable audio generation

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OpenAI has unveiled ChatGPT Enterprise, a version of the AI assistant tailored for businesses seeking advanced capabilities and reliable performance.

The crux of its appeal lies in its enhanced features, including an impressive 32,000-token context window. This upgrade enables ChatGPT Enterprise to process extended pieces of text or hold prolonged conversations, allowing for more nuanced and comprehensive exchanges.

One of the most significant leaps forward is the elimination of usage limits. Enterprise users will enjoy unrestricted access to GPT-4 queries that are delivered at accelerated speeds, heralding a new era of streamlined interactions and rapid data analysis.

Jorge Zuniga, Head of Data Systems and Integrations at Asana, said:

“ChatGPT Enterprise has cut down research time by an average of an hour per day, increasing productivity for people on our team. It’s been a powerful tool that has accelerated testing hypotheses and improving our internal systems.”

Security-conscious businesses can rest assured as ChatGPT Enterprise boasts a robust security framework. Data encryption “at rest” and “in transit” ensures data privacy through AES 256 and TLS 1.2+ technologies respectively. Customer prompts and sensitive corporate data also remain untapped for OpenAI model training.

In an era where data security is paramount, ChatGPT Enterprise has obtained SOC 2 compliance—providing some extra confidence in its stringent adherence to security, availability, processing integrity, and privacy standards.

Furthermore, the introduction of an administrative console enables efficient member management, domain verification, and single sign-on (SSO), catering to the complex needs of large-scale deployments.

OpenAI’s blog post touts ChatGPT’s impressive adoption. With over 80 percent uptake in Fortune 500 companies, industry titans such as Block, Canva, and PwC are utilising ChatGPT Enterprise to expedite tasks ranging from coding to crafting clearer communications.

Based on a Deloitte survey of CEOs, 79 percent of chief executives are of the opinion that generative AI will enhance operational efficiencies. Additionally, 52 percent of the surveyed CEOs hold the view that it will open up growth prospects, while 55 percent acknowledge that they are currently exploring or testing AI solutions.

Another study by Gartner revealed that 45 percent of top-level executives mentioned that exposure to ChatGPT had motivated them to boost their investments in AI. This trend is likely to continue with the introduction of ChatGPT Enterprise.

Claire Trachet, CEO and founder of business advisory Trachet, commented:

“As we saw with the debut of ChatGPT, investor confidence naturally grew with everyone wanting to capitalise on new technology that will inevitably change the way we work on a day-to-day basis. 

This is also coming at a time when the AI arms race is becoming more competitive, and consumers are becoming more familiar with AI technology. As a result, consumers and businesses are becoming more inclined to use and integrate this technology into their lives and businesses.

For startups and smaller businesses, this will act as a way to help them scale up in a more cost-effective way through M&A deals and gain investor interest.”

Amidst the fervour surrounding ChatGPT Enterprise, questions emerge about its potential to transform business processes. Andrej Karpathy of OpenAI believes it may become as essential as spreadsheets.

Danny Wu, Head of AI Products at Canva, said:

“From engineers troubleshooting bugs, to data analysts clustering free-form data, to finance analysts writing tricky spreadsheet formulas—the use cases for ChatGPT Enterprise are plenty.

It’s become a true enabler of productivity, with the dependable security and data privacy controls we need.”

However, it’s crucial to reiterate that GPT-4’s strengths lie more in analysis, explanation, summary, and translation, rather than being an infallible source of facts.

Pricing for ChatGPT Enterprise remains undisclosed. Enterprises looking to get started will have to wait for more information on how much this potentially groundbreaking AI tool will cost them.

(Photo by Sean Pollock on Unsplash)

See also: ChatGPT’s political bias highlighted in study

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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OpenAI has announced the ability to fine-tune its powerful language models, including both GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT-4.

The fine-tuning allows developers to tailor the models to their specific use cases and deploy these custom models at scale. This move aims to bridge the gap between AI capabilities and real-world applications, heralding a new era of highly-specialised AI interactions.

With early tests yielding impressive results, a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 Turbo has demonstrated the ability to not only match but even surpass the capabilities of the base GPT-4 for certain narrow tasks.

All data sent in and out of the fine-tuning API remains the property of the customer, ensuring that sensitive information remains secure and is not used to train other models.

The deployment of fine-tuning has garnered significant interest from developers and businesses. Since the introduction of GPT-3.5 Turbo, the demand for customising models to create unique user experiences has been on the rise.

Fine-tuning opens up a realm of possibilities across various use cases, including:

• Improved steerability: Developers can now fine-tune models to follow instructions more accurately. For instance, a business wanting consistent responses in a particular language can ensure that the model always responds in that language.

• Reliable output formatting: Consistent formatting of AI-generated responses is crucial, especially for applications like code completion or composing API calls. Fine-tuning improves the model’s ability to generate properly formatted responses, enhancing the user experience.

• Custom tone: Fine-tuning allows businesses to refine the tone of the model’s output to align with their brand’s voice. This ensures a consistent and on-brand communication style.

One significant advantage of fine-tuned GPT-3.5 Turbo is its extended token handling capacity. With the ability to handle 4k tokens – twice the capacity of previous fine-tuned models – developers can streamline their prompt sizes, leading to faster API calls and cost savings.

To achieve optimal results, fine-tuning can be combined with techniques such as prompt engineering, information retrieval, and function calling. OpenAI also plans to introduce support for fine-tuning with function calling and gpt-3.5-turbo-16k in the upcoming months.

The fine-tuning process involves several steps, including data preparation, file upload, creating a fine-tuning job, and using the fine-tuned model in production. OpenAI is working on a user interface to simplify the management of fine-tuning tasks.

The pricing structure for fine-tuning comprises two components: the initial training cost and usage costs.

• Training: $0.008 / 1K Tokens
• Usage input: $0.012 / 1K Tokens
• Usage output: $0.016 / 1K Tokens

The introduction of updated GPT-3 models – babbage-002 and davinci-002 – has also been announced, providing replacements for existing models and enabling fine-tuning for further customisation.

These latest announcements underscore OpenAI’s dedication to creating AI solutions that can be tailored to meet the unique needs of businesses and developers.

(Image Credit: Claudia from Pixabay)

See also: ChatGPT’s political bias highlighted in study

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is co-located with Digital Transformation Week.

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