The week in AI: OpenAI's drama unpacked

Plus: New text-to-video offerings from Meta and Stability

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Happy Thanksgiving and welcome to The Dispatch! We are the newsletter that keeps you informed about AI. Each Thursday, we aggregate the major developments in artificial intelligence; we pass along the news, useful resources, tools or services, and exciting projects in open source. Even if you aren’t an engineer, we’ll keep you in touch with what’s going on in AI.

Some dust is starting to settle after a whirlwind week of drama in Silicon Valley. Last Friday - with almost no warning and very little explanation - OpenAI’s board of directors voted to remove/fire Sam Altman from his position as CEO of the company, as well as demoting Greg Brockman from his position as president. Both executives are now back with the company in their former positions. Here is a timeline of events:

Little information has been revealed about the original decision to remove Altman, but rumors are swirling. Some are speculating that Project Q*, a mysterious discovery at OpenAI, was a major research breakthrough towards artificial general intelligence that may not have been handled properly internally. We’ll provide more updates as they come to light.

Some updates and coming upgrades happening with popular ChatGPT competitors:

Anthropic has released Claude 2.1, the latest version of its AI assistant, with several major upgrades including a 200,000 token context window, reduced rates of hallucination, and new tool use capabilities. Claude already had the largest context window in the business at 100,000 tokens; 200,000 is equivalent to 500 pages of text. Claude 2.1 is also more accurate and reliable in its outputs - a 30% drop in incorrect answers and 3-4x lower rates of unsupported claims.

Inflection is about to upgrade their popular chatbot Pi with Inflection-2, which they claim is the second most capable LLM in the world behind GPT-4. It exceeds Inflection-1 in factual knowledge, stylistic control, and reasoning abilities. Although not a primary focus, Inflection-2 showed strong capabilities in code and math reasoning benchmarks - outperforming all peers except GPT-4. It can be fine-tuned for enhanced coding abilities.

Google’s Bard can now chat with you and answer questions about YouTube videos.

Can AI help with grief? A Vox article explores the rise of "grief tech" - technology companies offering products and services aimed at helping people cope with grief and loss. Startups are selling controversial ghostbots - AI chatbots that mimic deceased loved ones, virtual companions that users can text for support, and tools to create interactive videos or audio recordings of the dead.

UnitedHealth, the largest health insurance company in the U.S., is facing a lawsuit for allegedly using a flawed AI algorithm which overrides doctors' judgments to deny critical health coverage to Medicare patients. This situation is part of a broader issue in the healthcare industry where AI use often results in biased and inaccurate outcomes. The lawsuit, seeking class-action status, highlights instances where coverage denials based on UnitedHealth’s ‘nH Predict’ algorithm were overwhelmingly overturned on appeal.

UnitedHealth insists that the tool is only for guidance and that coverage decisions adhere to plan terms and the standards and guidelines set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), a federal agency within the United States Department of Health and Human Services. The lawsuit accuses UnitedHealth and NaviHealth of multiple legal violations, seeking damages and an end to the AI-based denials.

ChatGPT with voice chat is now available to all app users, including the free tier. To get started with voice, go to Settings → New Features on the mobile app, and opt into voice conversations. The new voice capability is powered by a new text-to-speech model, capable of generating human-like audio from just text and a few seconds of sample speech. OpenAI collaborated with professional voice actors to create the voices and uses Whisper, their open-source speech recognition system, to transcribe spoken words into text.

More in AI this week:

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Trending AI Tools & Services:

  • Claude: 2.1 update; expanded context window and other upgrades for ChatGPT competitor

  • Claude for Sheets: Google Sheets extension to use Claude from Anthropic right in your spreadsheets

  • Chart My Life: record and visualise anything you want: calories, pages read, your children's tantrums, your sport habits or anything you can think of, with a simple voice interface

  • Iris: macOS app that enables multi-tasking with AI/smart interfacing with ChatGPT

  • AI Shadows: add or edit shadows in photos seamlessly

  • Bliss: the personal AI gift shopper for every person in your life

  • Nova-2 from Deepgram: the fastest, most accurate speech-to-text API

  • MaxAI.me: the fastest way to use ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, Bing anywhere online - the only generative AI-powered extension you need

Guides/useful/lists:

Social media/videos/podcasts:

  • Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the OpenAI debacle [Podcast]

  • Some Twitter/X users are getting early access to ‘Grok’ - Elon Musk’s new large language model intended to compete with ChatGPT [X]

  • Neuralink’s PRIME study could help cure quadriplegic patients [X]

  • (Discussion) So it turns out the OpenAI drama really was about a superintelligence breakthrough [Reddit]

  • (Discussion) Could the data scarcity problem be solved with synthetic data? [Reddit]

  • Andrej Karpathy - intro to Large Language Models [YouTube]

  • The truth about the OpenAI drama [YouTube]

Open source & technical:

  • (Microsoft) Successful integration of GPT-4V(ision) with human action observation, enabling robots to mimic human tasks effectively in a zero-shot manner

  • (Meta AI) Introducing Emu Video - text-to-video

  • (Stability AI) Introducing Stable Video Diffusion - text-to-video

  • (Open source) Screenshot-to-code: this app converts a screenshot to HTML/Tailwind CSS. It uses GPT-4 Vision to generate the code and DALL-E 3 to generate similar-looking images. You can now also enter a URL to clone a live website

  • (Open source) GPT-Crawler: crawl a site, generate knowledge files & create your own custom GPT from a URL

We hope you have an amazing Thanksgiving! See you next week.