Emmett Shear is interim CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, Brock and team head to Microsoft to build anew

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OpenAI board stuns the world by ousting Sam Altman and goes through two interim CEOs in the span of a weekend. Microsoft Ignite event identifies the company as “The Copilot company.” YouTube embraces AI holding hands with its artists.

Let’s get into it with…

TODAY’S DOWNLOAD

• OpenAI under new leadership

• Microsoft Ignite

• Create music with AI with DeepMind and YouTube

• Misconceptions about AI

• Detect speech and audio content with Netflix

AI NEWS & INSIGHTS

INDUSTRY NEWS & INSIGHTS

Emmett Shear pulled out of sabbatical to lead OpenAI

Shocking the world, one of arguably the most important startups of the last decade ousted its CEO, Sam Altman, causing a fast and immediate exodus of some of its best and brightest including fellow co-founder, Greg Brockman. The dust is appearing to settle and Emmet Shear will take the reigns as interim CEO of OpenAI while Sam, Brock, and loyalists will head to Microsoft to head up an entirely new company.

What’s the sitch?

Emmett’s three-point plan for the next 30 days:

1. Hire an independent investigator to dig into the entire process leading up to this point and generate a full report.

2. Continue to speak to as many of our employees, partners, investors, and customers as possible, take good notes, and share the key takeaways.

3. Reform the management and leadership team in light of recent departures into an effective force to drive results for our customers.

Why Emmett?

1. Strong leadership experience - experience as the previous CEO of Twitch and was one of its co-founders

2. Availability - was on sabbatical and could easily slide in without being pulled from another employer

3. Relationships and Trust - Shear has been working as a partner at Y Combinator where his old Twitch co-founder, Michael Seibel, is a managing partner. Sam Altman was president of Y Combinator until 2019.

Microsoft Ignite 2023

There were lots of announcements at Microsoft Ignite that were largely silenced while the OpenAI debacle unfolded on Friday and throughout the entire weekend.

The event had some key areas of focus

1. Rethinking cloud infrastructure

2. Extending the Microsoft Copilot experience (more in the next edition)

3. Reinforcing data and AI connection

4. Unlocking more value for devs with Azure AI

5. Enabling responsible development of AI

6. New experiences in Windows to empower employees

7. New Nvidia AI foundry service

8. Strengthening defenses in the era of AI

Copilot specifically will unlock productivity at scale for employees across all Microsoft Windows users.

AUTOMATION AND ANTICS

AUTOMATION ALLEY

Music Creation is made easy with DeepMind and YouTube

AI experiments are being driven by a partnership between Google’s DeepMind and YouTube to bring creativity to the forefront while allowing artists to lend their vocals in ways that previously were not possible while also allowing appropriate protections for artists.

Two AI experiments

Dream Track - create a 30-second soundtrack of your favorite artist for your YouTube shorts.

Music AI Tools - create instrumental scores with nothing but the sound of your voice.

ANTICS AVENUE

Misconceptions about AI according to Microsoft

Myths

1. AI will take everyone’s jobs

2. AI is only for people who work in tech

3. AI is one thing

4. AI is inherently biased and should be avoided

Our thoughts

AI might not take all of our jobs but with it and the advancements in robotics, it could. 🤔 

AI will likely make way for alternative jobs but it’s extremely unclear at what pace new jobs will be created and if it will be able to offset the jobs that are displaced. There is a very real reason why OpenAI and others are studying universal basic income.

TOOLS, TUTORIALS, & TESTIMONIALS

TOOL & TUTORIAL SPOTLIGHT

Detect speech and music in audio content with Netflix

Love film and TV? Who doesn’t? 

Netflix introduces a speech and music detection-enabling technology with some practical use cases.

1. Audio dataset preparation

2. Dialogue analysis & processing

3. Music information retrieval

4. Localization & Dubbing

Reproduce all experiments using the TV Speech and Music dataset on GitHub with supporting Python code for assisting research on speed and music detection tasks.

EVENTS & EPILOGUE

UPCOMING EVENTS AND OPPORTUNITIES

• 11/27-11/28 New York Technology Forum (link)

• 11/29 AI for Developers Meetup SF (link)

• 12/6-12/7 AI Summit New York (link)

• 12/10Microsoft AI Classroom Hackathon (link)

QUICK LINKS & RESOURCES

• Original Open AI Leadership change announcement (link)

• Open AI Board members that fired Sam (link)

• What is quantum Utility? (link)

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I look forward to seeing you in the next newsletter!

Chris