OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has transferred formal control of the eponymously firm’s named corporate venture fund to Ian Cathaway, OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch.
The Open AI Startup Fund, launched in 2021, was initially set up with Altman as its named controller.
Cathaway joined OpenAI in 2021 and played a key role managing the Startup Fund, leading investments in Ambience Healthcare, Cursor, Harvey, and Speak.
Last year, the fund had $175 million in commitments, and now holds $325 million in gross net asset value, according to an SEC filing.
The Startup Fund has backed at least 16 other startups, according to PitchBook data.
The big cloud vendors have all already lined up with other chatbot partners: Microsoft with OpenAI, Google and Amazon with Anthropic; Cohere picking up assorted others like Oracle and Salesforce.
If and when Inflection ever perfected Pi on its enormous AI infrastructure, the race looked to be already lost.
Despite close ties with OpenAI, Microsoft also has many reasons to be needing a backup for it’s all-important AI gambit.
There are so many red flags with OpenAI that Microsoft is wise to wean its dependence.
Then again, just like Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI, we wonder if regulators will also have something to say about this deal.
In June 2023, Inflection announced it had raised $1.3 billion to build what it called “more personal AI.” The lead investor was Microsoft.
Today, less than a year later, Microsoft announced that it was essentially eating Inflection alive (though I think they phrased it differently).
Co-founders Mustafa Suleyman and Karén Simonyan will go to Microsoft, where the former will head up the newly formed Microsoft AI division, along with “several members” of their team as Microsoft put it — or “most of the staff,” as Bloomberg reports it.
Ultimately Microsoft got a bit of extra leverage on the company instead of eating it alive.
Whether it was OpenAI or Inflection, Microsoft was feeding their cash and compute addictions, whispering in their ear about partnerships, and then as soon as they tripped, out came the hidden fork and knife.
OpenAI’s legal battle with The New York Times over data to train its AI models might still be brewing.
But OpenAI’s forging ahead on deals with other publishers, including some of France’s and Spain’s largest news publishers.
OpenAI on Wednesday announced that it signed contracts with Le Monde and Prisa Media to bring French and Spanish news content to OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot.
So, OpenAI’s revealed licensing deals with a handful of content providers at this point.
The Information reported in January that OpenAI was offering publishers between $1 million and $5 million a year to access archives to train its GenAI models.
Should artists whose work was used to train generative AI like ChatGPT be compensated for their contributions?
OpenAI is in a delicate legal position where it concerns the ways in which it uses data to train generative AI systems like the art-creating tool DALL-E 3, which is incorporated into ChatGPT.
“Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents,” writes the company in a January blog post.
OpenAI has licensing agreements in place with some content providers, like Shutterstock, and allows webmasters to block its web crawler from scraping their site for training data.
In addition, like some of its rivals, OpenAI lets artists “opt out” of and remove their work from the data sets that the company uses to train its image-generating models.
Watch: Elon Musk, Sam Altman and the rest of the billionaires are fighting over the future of AIThe scrap over who should run OpenAI, and how it should be managed is still the hottest topic in tech.
Most recently, former co-founder and backer Elon Musk sued the AI company best known for ChatGPT and its work with Microsoft for what he considers to be an abandonment of its founding principals.
That suit kicked off a storm of discussion amongst tech investors, some of whom have a stake in OpenAI.
Is his view hurting work on open-source AI?
Buckle up, everyone, it’s going to be one hell of a year for tech drama.
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This week, Roku played hardball with its customers, requiring them to consent to new dispute resolution terms.
And Elon Musk, the CEO of X, sued OpenAI over allegedly “betraying” its nonprofit mission.
NewsEpic takedown: Apple has terminated Epic Games’ App Store developer account, reportedly calling it a “threat” to the iOS ecosystem.
Musk money: Four former Twitter executives, including ex-CEO Parag Agrawal, sued Musk on Monday, alleging that they’re owed over $128 million in severance payments.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has a seat at the table — or board, rather — once again.
OpenAI today announced that Altman will be rejoining the company’s board of directors several months after losing his seat and being forced out as OpenAI’s CEO.
Joining alongside him are three members, former CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former Sony Entertainment president Nicole Seligman and Instacard CEO Fidji Simo — bringing OpenAI’s board to seven people.
Seligman was Sony’s VC and general counsel before rising through the ranks to CEO of Sony Corporation and president of Sony Corporation of America.
Both OpenAI CTO Mira Murati and Ilya Sutskever, a former OpenAI board member and the startup’s chief scientist, approached members of OpenAI’s previous board to express concerns about Altman’s behavior prior to his ouster last year, according to The Times.
Sarah Kreps is a political scientist, U.S. Air Force veteran and analyst who focuses on U.S. foreign and defense policy.
She’s a professor of government at Cornell University, adjunct professor of law at Cornell Law School and an adjunct scholar at West Point’s Modern War Institute.
Kreps’ recent research explores both the potential and risks of AI tech such as OpenAI’s GPT-4, specifically in the political sphere.
In an opinion column for The Guardian last year, she wrote that, as more money pours into AI, the AI arms race not just across companies but countries will intensify — while the AI policy challenge will become harder.
Developing AI in these publicly interested way seemed like a valuable contribution and interesting interdisciplinary work for political scientists and computer scientists.
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