OpenAI has responded to a letter sent by the Congressional Black Caucus that flagged the lack of diversity on its board.
OpenAI’s response letter, which TechCrunch saw, was dated January 5 and signed by CEO Sam Altman and Chairman of the Board Bret Taylor.
The OpenAI board has received criticism for its lack of gender and racial diversity since its reconfiguration after Altman’s ousting and prompt return in November.
In mid-December, CBC Chairs Rep. Emanuel Cleaver and Rep. Barbara Lee sent a letter to OpenAI, asking it to “move expeditiously” in diversifying its board.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment regarding its response letter or its plans to diversify its board.
OpenAI is always making slight adjustments to its models and pricing, and today brings just such an occasion.
It’s also a popular API, being lower cost and faster than GPT-4 on a lot of tasks.
Hence the steady ratcheting down of prices — though it’s also a natural result of streamlining the models and improving their infrastructure.
GPT-3.5 Turbo also gets a new model version, 0125 (i.e.
And the company also released a new version of its free moderation API — which identifies potentially harmful text.
OpenAI has its first higher education customer: Arizona State University (ASU).
Today, ASU announced that it’s collaborating with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot, to the university’s researchers, staff and faculty.
Since then, some have reversed their bans, while others have begun hosting workshops on generative AI tools and their potential for learning.
Launched in August, ChatGPT Enterprise can perform the same tasks as ChatGPT, such as writing emails, debugging computer code and drafting essays.
“Right now, we’re hyper-focused on putting ChatGPT Enterprise into the hands of our knowledge core … to be at the forefront of discovery and implementation.”
In an unannounced update to its usage policy, OpenAI has opened the door to military applications of its technologies.
While the policy previously prohibited use of its products for the purposes of “military and warfare,” that language has now disappeared, and OpenAI did not deny that it was now open to military uses.
Unannounced changes to policy wording happen fairly frequently in tech as the products they govern the use of evolve and change, and OpenAI is clearly no different.
It’s a substantive, consequential change of policy, not a restatement of the same policy.
Even a strict “no military” policy has to stop after a few removes.
The race to perfect the humanoid form factor will be one of 2024’s defining tech stories.
1X is a name (well, a number and letter) that surprisingly doesn’t get as much column space as most of the above.
That underlying technology will almost certainly play an outsized role in shaping robotics’ future, and OpenAI has seemingly picked its horse.
The humanoid robot strikes a similar figure (so to speak) as some of the competition.
The logic (stop me if you’ve heard this one before) is that humanoids are the ideal form factor for navigating environments built by humanoids for humanoids.
OpenAI is launching a new subscription plan for ChatGPT, its viral AI-powered chatbot, aimed at smaller, self-service-oriented teams.
Aptly called ChatGPT Team, the plan provides a dedicated workspace for teams up to 149 people using ChatGPT as well as admin tools for team management.
ChatGPT Team also lets people within a team build and share GPTs, custom apps based on OpenAI’s text-generating AI models.
ChatGPT Team is priced at $30 per user per month or $25 per user per month billed annually — higher than ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s individual premium ChatGPT plan, which costs $20 per month.
ChatGPT Team seems tailor-made for small- and medium-sized business customers who want team-oriented ChatGPT features without having to pay top dollar for them.
This is a popular topic on TechCrunch+, where columnists spend considerable time discussing how startups can take advantage of OpenAI.
The following subscriber-only articles should serve as a foundation for founders building an AI startup on or off OpenAI’s platform.
Chris Ackerson, formerly on the IBM Watson team and now VP of Product at AlphaSense, explains the best ways for a startup to develop a generative AI copilot.
Read more here…Startups must add AI value beyond ChatGPT integrationThe AI hype train is going full swing.
From internal efficiency and productivity to external products and services, companies are racing to implement generative AI technologies across every sector of the economy.
The European Union is checking whether Microsoft’s investment in generative AI giant OpenAI is reviewable under the bloc’s merger regulations, it said today.
“Finally, the European Commission is checking whether Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI might be reviewable under the EU Merger Regulation,” it added.
Commenting in a statement, EU competition chief Margrethe Vestager said:Virtual worlds and generative AI are rapidly developing.
They also told us there are no “particular concerns” the EU has identified yet vis-a-vis competition and generative AI as yet.
Per the spokesperson, a transaction would be notifiable to the Commission under the EU Merger Regulation if it involves ” a change of control on a lasting basis”.
In late December, The New York Times sued OpenAI and its close collaborator and investor, Microsoft, for allegedly violating copyright law by training generative AI models on Times’ content.
Today, OpenAI published a public response in which the startup — unsurprisingly — claims that the case is without merit.
“Interestingly, the regurgitations The New York Times [cite in its lawsuit] appear to be from years-old articles that have proliferated on multiple third-party websites,” OpenAI writes.
The Times is only the latest copyright holder to sue OpenAI over what it believes is a clear violation of IP rights.
Actress Sarah Silverman joined a pair of lawsuits in July that accuse Meta and OpenAI of having “ingested” Silverman’s memoir to train their AI models.
With so much in the rearview mirror, it’s hard to predict what will happen with AI startups in 2024.
But some people, like investors, make their living from shrewd bets, so TechCrunch+ recently asked more than 40 investors what they think AI investing could look like in 2024.
Most investors told TechCrunch+ that they expect the current swell of funding to continue but were optimistic that the industry is moving past its initial hype cycle and toward more durable businesses.
Lisa Wu, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, expects opportunities in verticalized AI to be particularly attractive this year.
“For example, law firms that effectively leverage AI will be able to offer their services at lower cost, higher efficiency and higher odds of favorable outcomes in litigation.”
