Microsoft Hires OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

Today’s top AI Highlights:

1. Twitch CEO Hired as OpenAI’s Interim CEO

2. 3D Human Avatars with Gaussian Splatting

3. Streamlining Scalable Machine Learning Projects

4. Get Real-Time Visual Weather Report

& so much more!

Read time: 3 mins

Latest Developments 🌍

What All Has Gone Down with Sam Altman at OpenAI 🗞️

In a dramatic and rather shocking series of events, Sam Altman was ousted as the CEO of OpenAI by the Board for not being “consistently candid in his communications with the board”, and Mira Murti, CTO of OpenAI was appointed as the interim CEO considering her experience. Following is all that we know yet, both facts and theories in chronology:

Theories:

• Sam Altman was straying from OpenAI’s primary objective of attaining AGI and focused more on the growth and capital of the company.

• The announcements made at the Dev Day on November 6th including the feature to build your own custom GPTs triggered OpenAI’s Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever’s fears of AI running autonomously

• Sam Altman was reportedly planning on launching AI companies and seeking funds that would make him too powerful to be accountable to OpenAI’s board.

• There were apparently some significant data leaks with the launch of new GPTs and someone had to be made accountable for this.

3D Controllable Model for Human Avatars 🕺

Imagine being able to create lifelike human avatars easily and quickly. Introducing Meta’s new research Drivable 3D Gaussian Avatars (D3GA) that simplifies the process of making 3D human models. D3GA uses a unique approach called 3D Gaussian Splatting to render these avatars in real-time, making it a lot faster and more practical than older methods.

Key Highlights:

• D3GA Gaussian Splatting technique, a departure from traditional photorealistic avatar rendering methods that often require intensive 3D registrations or dense input images. This approach enables the rendering of realistic human models at real-time framerates using multi-view video inputs.

• The model uses cage deformations, controlled by joint angles and keypoints, for more accurate and flexible avatar movement, resulting in better garment separation and the ability to decompose avatars into distinct clothing layers.

• D3GA was rigorously tested across a wide range of subjects with varying body shapes, clothing, and movements, demonstrating superior quality compared to existing state-of-the-art methods. The method showcases robustness and adaptability to different human forms and movements.

Scaling Up Machine Learning with Ease 📈

As the demand for complex machine learning applications grows, SynapseML steps in to simplify and enhance this process. Developed by Microsoft, this open-source library is designed to streamline the creation of massively scalable machine learning pipelines, catering to a range of tasks from anomaly detection to text analytics. It's a boon for developers seeking efficiency and scalability in their ML projects.

Key Highlights:

1. Versatile Machine Learning Tasks: SynapseML excels in various ML domains including text analytics, computer vision, and anomaly detection. It's built on Apache Spark, offering compatibility with existing Spark workflows and facilitating seamless model integration.

2. Scalability and Language Support: The library supports single-node, multi-node, and resizable cluster setups, ensuring efficient resource usage. It's accessible across multiple programming languages like Python, R, Scala, Java, and .NET, enhancing its usability in diverse computing environments.

3. Advanced Features and Integration: SynapseML introduces features such as distributed microservice orchestration, hardware-accelerated model inference, and tools for understanding model biases. It also facilitates the automatic generation of Spark bindings, making it a comprehensive tool for modern ML challenges.

Tools of the Trade ⚒️

• Visual Weather Artist GPT: Tell ChatGPT your location (or any other) and it will draw the current weather conditions for you, a unique never-before-seen weather report!

• Reworkd: AI-powered platform that optimizes web scraping by using AI to generate and repair scraping code, adapting to changes on websites, enabling efficient scaling of data extraction.

• Fal.ai: A platform focused on AI inference, enabling the building of real-time AI applications. It offers fast AI inference processing (under approximately 120ms) with a cost-efficient model where users pay only for what they use.

• Linfo.ai: AI-powered platform that simplifies content consumption by providing structured summaries, intuitive web navigation, personalized collections with emoji reactions, and multimedia support for efficient knowledge extraction.

• Mobile Rollbacks by Runway: Instant resolution of critical bugs in mobile apps with a single click, by preparing and managing rollback builds automatically in the background of each release cycle.

Hot Takes 🔥

1. Chaos has been achieved internally. ~ Dan Shipper

2. Dear Mira and Ilya…Few of your top researchers have already quit, and if there is one thing Sam Altman is especially good at, it is raising and deploying capital. Before the sign with your name and title as “CEO” and “Defacto CEO” gets emblazoned in the OpenAI offices, Sam would have a new company, $1 billion investment and offers out to all your, soon to be ex, top product people and researchers.… ~ Varun_Mathur

3. It seems like Altman was leveraging his OpenAI streetcred to build new personal AI companies (a compute one and a device one), which: 1. would provide him with potentially enormous amounts of bargaining power with OpenAI, especially the compute one. 2. would make him much more independent from OpenAI's governance structure. This might have legitimately fueled concerns about Sam becoming too powerful to be accountable for pursuing OpenAI's mission. ~ Siméon

Meme of the Day 🤡

That’s all for today!

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