OpenAI is losing key employees...

OpenAI's rivals are swooping in for the talent grab after Altman's abrupt exit

Author

Wishu
November 21, 2023

Hello. "He would not take such drastic action unless he felt it was absolutely necessary," Elon Musk said in defense of OpenAI founder and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever's role in former CEO Sam Altman's ouster.

— James Xu-Johnson

OpenAI's rivals rush to poach staff after Altman ouster

OpenAI's rivals are swooping in for the talent grab after Altman's abrupt exit. Picture this: Cohere and Adept making a beeline for OpenAI staff, while Google's DeepMind is suddenly flooded with resumes from the now-vulnerable organization. The drama unfolds as employee and investor backlash puts pressure on OpenAI's board to reconsider.

In the aftermath, Anthropic, OpenAI's arch-nemesis, posts job listings on LinkedIn like it's no big deal, while Aidan Gomez of Cohere and Amjad Masad of Replit waste no time flaunting their companies' career pages. It's a recruiting frenzy, and Altman's potential new AI venture is stirring the pot even more.

"This may be the splinter that turns [generative AI] into an industry instead of a single dominant entity," says Nabeel Hyatt from Spark Capital, throwing in some industry insight.

With OpenAI's stellar track record and a whopping 700+ employees, the stakes are high. The worry? Will the departure of key players slow down the innovation train? Apoorva Govind from Bestever is concerned, predicting a brain drain that could impact the speed of product shipments.

In a nutshell, OpenAI's rivals are smelling blood, and the industry is watching closely as the plot thickens.

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With Amo, the founder of Zenly wants to make social apps social again

In 2018, we declared the end of true social connection on platforms like TikTok and Instagram. Now, they're all blending into an algorithm-driven stream of short videos from influencers, losing the essence of genuine connection.

ID by Amo: Amo, led by ex-Zenly co-founder Antoine Martin, introduces ID, an iOS app harking back to the creative era of MySpace and early blogs. It's a virtual canvas allowing users to express themselves and connect with friends in a refreshingly artistic way.

Anticipation and unconventional funding: Amo's ID launch is creating a buzz, backed by an $18 million funding round in 2023. Unlike passive social networks, ID aims to combat loneliness by bringing back the personal touch of early Facebook, encouraging users to take breaks and prioritize genuine connections over endless scrolling.

Companies tried to spend less on cloud. Then AI showed up.

The AI Cloud Boom: Buckle Up for the Spending Surge:

Brace yourselves, tech titans! Cloud spending is set to skyrocket in 2024, fueled by the unstoppable rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) services. Just ask Diogo Rau from Eli Lilly, who's boosting cloud usage for lightning-fast drug discovery with the help of AI.

Gartner spills the beans, predicting a 20.4% surge in the global cloud market to a whopping $678.8 billion by 2024. The real MVP? Cloud infrastructure, the unsung hero powering AI, software, and applications, expected to grow at a blazing 26.6% next year.

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It's a classic tech tale – as businesses cozy up to generative AI, the love affair with the cloud gets pricier. CIOs find themselves caught in a balancing act, juggling the pressure to prove AI's business chops while keeping a tight grip on those cloud costs. Sure, big players like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are banking on AI to revitalize their cloud game. But CIOs haven't forgotten the art of penny-pinching; cloud cost control remains the untamed beast, even as generative AI throws budgets a curveball.

I tried Meta’s ad-free Instagram subscription. This is what it was like.

Euro perks: Ad-free Instagram across the pond:

  • European Instagram enthusiasts now have the golden ticket to an ad-free utopia, courtesy of Meta's subscription service, requiring a modest fee of around $14.

  • But, hold your double-tap! While the sponsored post invasion takes a breather, pesky suggestions and data collection linger like the last guest at a party.

Swipe right on ad relief: The before and after:

  • Unleashing the ad-free genie on Instagram brings forth a smoother sail through Stories and Reels, sans the irritating ad sandwich that used to plague your daily scroll.

  • The official ads take a hike, but don't stash away that skepticism just yet. Your feed might still boast shoutouts to protein yogurt from fitness gurus and the local bakery's festive sales pitch.

Meta's data dance and the price tag predicament:

  • Meta insists on a data diet: Pay up, and your info won't fund more ads. But, spoiler alert, they're still peeking at your likes and clicks to fuel the algorithmic content fire.

  • The exclusive ad-free Instagram lounge is currently only open to those across the pond, with subscription costs poised to dance the price hike jig next year. Is it worth the Insta-escape price tag, or are we just swiping left on another digital hustle? 🤷‍♀️

IRL founders allege investors sabotaged company with fake users claims

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The lawsuit specifically names Chi-Hua Chien of Goodwater Capital, Serena Dayal of SoftBank and Mike Maples of Floodgate. From these investors, the social calendar app raised over $200 million, reaching a valuation of $1.17 billion; SoftBank in particular led IRL’s $170 million Series C round in 2021.

IRL is just the latest formerly buzzy startup to come under fire for potentially falsified metrics. The massive one-click checkout company Bolt and co-founder Ryan Breslow faced an SEC probe after investors raised concerns that Bolt misrepresented the company’s financial state when trying to raise a $355 million Series E round.

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YouTube’s generative music experiments come at a tense time for artists and AI

YouTube Music is passing the mic to AI with a new feature that will allow users to generate music in the style of pop stars like Sia, John Legend, and T-Pain—with the permission of the artists.

The tool draws on a Google DeepMind music generation model called Lyria and is designed to produce unique backing tracks for creators on the TikTok-esque YouTube shorts platform.

YouTube’s Dream Track feature can auto-generate 30-second audio clips based on a text prompt like “a ballad about how opposites attract, upbeat acoustic.”

The new tool comes at a fraught time in relations between AI engineers and the artists and writers whose work their models rely on.

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