Microsoft: OpenAI’s Chaos and Windows TCO
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OpenAI
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Gizmodo ☛ ChatGPT Is Apparently a Great Surveillance Tool
Social Links, which was previously kicked off Meta’s platforms for alleged surveillance of users, showed off its unconventional use of ChatGPT at a security conference in Paris this week. The company was able to weaponize the chatbot’s ability for text summarization and analysis to troll through large chunks of data, digesting it quickly. In a demonstration, the company fed data collected by its own proprietary tool into ChatGPT; the data, which related to online posts about a recent controversy in Spain, was then analyzed by the chatbot, which rated them “as positive, negative or neutral, displaying the results in an interactive graph,” Forbes writes.
Obviously, privacy advocates have found this more than a little disturbing—not merely because of this specific case, but for what it says about how AI could escalate the powers of the surveillance industry in general.
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The University of Cambridge ☛ Oops! We Automated Bullshit: ChatGPT is a bullshit generator. To understand AI, we should think harder about bullshit
MIT Professor of AI Rodney Brooks summarises the working principle of ChatGPT as “it just makes up stuff that sounds good”. This is mathematically accurate, where “sounds good” is an algorithm to imitate text found on the internet, while “makes up” is the basic randomness of relying on predictive text rather than logic or facts. Other leading researchers and professors of AI say the same things, with more technical detail, as in the famous “stochastic parrots” paper by Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru and their colleagues, or Murray Shanahan’s explanation of the text prediction principles (references below).
“Godfather of AI” Geoff Hinton, in recent public talks, explains that one of the greatest risks is not that chatbots will become super-intelligent, but that they will generate text that is super-persuasive without being intelligent, in the manner of Donald Trump or Boris Johnson. In a world where evidence and logic are not respected in public debate, Hinton imagines that systems operating without evidence or logic could become our overlords by becoming superhumanly persuasive, imitating and supplanting the worst kinds of political leader.
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New York Times ☛ OpenAI’s Board Pushes Out Sam Altman, Its High-Profile C.E.O.
Mr. Altman was asked to join a video meeting with the board at noon on Friday and was immediately fired, according to Mr. Brockman. Mr. Brockman said that even though he was the chairman of the board, he was not part of this board meeting.
He said that the board informed him of Mr. Altman’s ouster minutes later. Around the same time, the board published a blog post.
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Vice Media Group ☛ Sam Altman Out at OpenAI ‘Effective Immediately’
For much of the last two years, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had looked poised to dominate the technology world for the coming decade—the AI era’s Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, or Mark Zuckerberg.
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Gizmodo ☛ OpenAI Fires CEO Sam Altman
OpenAI announced Friday that Sam Altman departed the company on Friday. Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati has been appointed interim CEO to lead OpenAI. The news comes just weeks after OpenAI’s DevDay, where Sam Altman announced some of the company’s biggest advancements yet.
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Silicon Angle ☛ AI coup: Sam Altman fired from OpenAI after board finds he wasn’t ‘consistently candid’
And it was sudden: The New York Times noted that Altman showed no indication of his departure when he appeared at an event in Oakland, California, on Thursday evening. Microsoft reportedly was not made aware of the decision until very shortly beforehand.
The board’s specific issues with Altman were not clear Friday afternoon, though later reports in the evening indicated that the board, in particular Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever, felt Altman was moving too fast without adequately considering safety issues, an escalating concern for AI models.
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The Atlantic ☛ The Sudden Fall of Sam Altman
The suddenness of this announcement, and the Icarus-like fall it represents for Altman, is difficult to overstate. In 2015, Altman convened a now-famous dinner at the Rosewood Sand Hill, in Menlo Park, California, with Elon Musk and a small group of others, at which they agreed to found OpenAI. Various tech luminaries committed $1 billion to the company, including Musk, who agreed to co-chair its board with Altman. Their partnership lasted only until 2018, when Musk made a play to become the company’s CEO, as reported by Semafor. Altman led the resistance and, a year later, assumed the CEO title for himself.
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Futurism ☛ OpenAI Just Fired Sam Altman, Its Charismatic CEO
Regardless, though, it's clear that something went amiss behind the scenes.
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India Times ☛ The OpenAI board which fired Sam Altman
Sam Altman’s ouster followed wide-ranging disagreements between the CEO and his board. The debates included differences of opinion on AI safety, the speed of development of the technology and the commercialization of the company.
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India Times ☛ OpenAI cofounder Greg Brockman on how Ilya Sutskever, company board fired Sam Altman over Google Meet
Greg was told that he was being removed from the board (but was vital to the company and would retain his role) and that Sam had been fired. Around the same time, OpenAI published a blog post. - As far as we know, the management team was made aware of this shortly after, other than Mira who found out the night prior. The outpouring of support has been really nice; thank you, but please don’t spend any time being concerned. We will be fine. Greater things coming soon.
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India Times ☛ OpenAI president Greg Brockman quits hours after CEO Sam Altman's removal
Altman posted on X shortly after OpenAI published its blog: "i loved my time at openai. it was transformative for me personally, and hopefully the world a little bit. most of all i loved working with such talented people. will have more to say about what’s next later."
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Hindustan Times ☛ ChatGPT creator OpenAI fires CEO Sam Altman
OpenAI's board of directors consists of OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, Quora CEO Adam D'Angelo, technology entrepreneur Tasha McCauley, and Georgetown Center for Security and Emerging Technology's Helen Toner.
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India Times ☛ OpenAI CEO’s ouster followed debates between Sam Altman, board
The debates included differences of opinion on AI safety, the speed of development of the technology and the commercialization of the company, said the person, who asked not to be identified discussing private information.
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India Times ☛ In ousting CEO Sam Altman, ChatGPT loses its best fundraiser
The company reassured staff that it would be fine without him, but the Silicon Valley superstar, who once ran the best known startup incubator YCombinator, or YC, leaves the company with a big hole to fill in its fundraising efforts: maintaining the software costs some very real money. It also takes talented engineers, who flocked to Altman.
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Deutsche Welle ☛ Sam Altman: OpenAI CEO ousted from company, board declares
Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, has departed the company, its board of directors said Friday. OpenAI is behind the pioneering AI chatbot ChatGPT.
OpenAI's board wrote in a statement that Altman will step down as CEO and will be replaced temporarily by Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.
The search for a permanent CEO continues, the statement read.
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Axios ☛ Microsoft was blindsided by OpenAI's ouster of CEO Sam Altman
Catch up quick: OpenAI announced Altman's forced departure in a press release during the business day on Friday, less than a day after he had represented the company at the APEC conference in San Francisco. CTO Mira Murati was named interim CEO.
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Hindustan Times ☛ Sam Altman sacked: Who is Mira Murati, interim CEO of ChatGPT's OpenAI?
Born in Albania to Albanian parents and educated in Canada, Mira Murati is a mechanical engineer by training who built a hybrid racecar as an undergraduate student at Dartmouth College.
While in school, she interned at Goldman Sachs.
She joined OpenAI in 2018 after stints at Tesla, where she played an important role in the development of the Model X car, and Leap Motion, a start-up that developed a computing system to track hand and finger motions, The New York Times reported.
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Windows TCO
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Federal News Network ☛ National Cybersecurity Strategy needs an observability focus
Disruptions caused by cyberattacks aren’t just expensive, they also halt critical services throughout networks. Downtime, a detrimental result of cyberattacks, has been shown to cost upwards of $500,000 per hour. With critical infrastructure increasingly being a focus for exploitation, there’s a growing need for agencies to implement observability strategies.
The unfortunate reality of observability is that its existence in the public sector lacks maturity. This often stems from agencies leveraging dozens of tools to monitor their tech stack. With no interoperability between these tools, this system creates data silos that result in blind spots and cause IT teams to miss critical alerts that signal a cyberattack.
To make matters worse, these legacy tools weren’t built to handle the varying tech stack that agencies rely on. Monitoring tools traditionally function by alerting an engineer of an issue. Once alerted, the engineer is forced to interpret the dashboard or logs to identify the problem. But this strategy creates an environment of too much guesswork and costs more harm than good.
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Security Week ☛ CitrixBleed Vulnerability Exploitation Suspected in Toyota Ransomware Attack
The ransomware group known as Medusa and MedusaLocker has taken credit for the attack, listing Toyota Financial Services on its Tor-based leak website and threatening to distribute stolen data unless an $8 million ransom is paid within 10 days.
Screenshots and a file tree made public by the cybercriminals to demonstrate their claims indicate that the information was stolen from Toyota Financial Services systems in Germany.
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The Record ☛ Toyota recovering from cyberattack on its financial services division
Cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont noted that Toyota systems accessible through the internet are vulnerable to the “Citrix Bleed” vulnerability that has affected dozens of large companies and governments since it was announced late last month.
The carmaker has dealt with several cybersecurity incidents over the last three years, including a wide-ranging incident announced in May where information on more than 2 million vehicles in Japan was exposed for more than a decade.
Toyota dealt with another breach in April and had to resolve a separate security issue that allowed for widespread access to a platform used by employees to coordinate operations.
The company’s statement came hours after the Medusa ransomware gang claimed to have stolen data from Toyota Financial Services. The group gave the company 10 days to pay a $8 million ransom.
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Federal News Network ☛ OPM watchdog flags cybersecurity concerns for USPS health care marketplace
The Office of Personnel Management faces a tight deadline to set up a new health insurance marketplace for Postal Service employees and retirees to enroll in new plans, starting next year.
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