🥟 Chao-Down #217 OpenAI's weekend of chaos, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman join Microsoft to lead new advanced AI research org, Cruise CEO and founder steps down from self-driving car venture

In what probably was the most chaotic and consequential weekend in AI ever, we just witnessed the corporate balance of power shift overnight.

Featuring corporate coups, a debate over AI safety and commercialization, a possible CEO return, and Microsoft coming out as ultimate winners in this, the story is nothing short of a Netflix docuseries (who’s pitching this?) better than any reality TV.

Many details can be found by the heroic efforts of journalists who worked across the weekend, but in short:

• OpenAI’s board (which is mandated to ensure safe artificial general intelligence) fired Sam Altman for not being “candid” enough in his communication.

• The very public fallout that happened after resulted in investors and even OpenAI itself to try to bring back Sam as CEO.

• In parallel, the board was looking for their own CEO and ultimately nominated Emett Shear, co-founder of Twitch, as the new interim CEO of OpenAI.

• As a result of all this, Satya Nadella announced that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman will be joining Microsoft to form a new AI research organization.

It’s been an incredible 72 hours with certainly more to come. One thing’s for sure, there’s never a dull moment in AI.

-Alex, your resident Chaos Coordinator.

What happened in AI? 📰

How ChatGPT Fractured OpenAI (The Atlantic)

A timeline of Sam Altman’s firing from OpenAI — and the fallout (TechCrunch)

Microsoft hires ex-OpenAI leaders Altman and Brockman to lead new AI group (TechCrunch)

GM-owned robotaxi unit: Cruise CEO and founder Kyle Vogt resigns (CNBC)

OpenAI's leadership drama underscores why its GPT model security needs fixing | VentureBeat

Meta disbanded its Responsible AI team (The Verge)

Always be Learnin’ 📕 📖

Open, rigorous and reproducible research: A practitioner’s handbook (stanforddatascience.github.io)

Projects to Keep an Eye On 🛠

BuilderIO/gpt-crawler: Crawl a site to generate knowledge files to create your own custom GPT from a URL (Github)

monkeypatch/monkeypatch.py: The easiest way to build scalable LLM-powered applications, which get cheaper and faster over time. (Github)

LoRA Exchange (LoRAX): Serve 100s of Fine-Tuned LLMs for the Cost of 1 - (Predibase)

The Latest in AI Research 💡

zjukg/KnowPAT: Knowledgeable Preference Alignment for LLMs in Domain-specific Question Answering (Github)

junyangwang0410/AMBER: An Automated Multi-dimensional Benchmark for Multi-modal Hallucination Evaluation (Github)

Levels of AGI: Operationalizing Progress on the Path to AGI (arxiv)

The World Outside of AI 🌎

Ozempic, Weight-Loss Drugs Make Thanksgiving Less About the Food (Bloomberg)

China pandas: Xi Jinping hints he could send new pandas to US as ‘envoys of friendship’ (CNN)

The Government Is Now the Hottest Tech Employer in Town (WIRED)

Race Cannot Be Used to Predict Heart Disease, Scientists Say - The New York Times

Is Carbonated Water Bad for You? What to Know About Seltzer, Sparkling Drinks - Bloomberg 

At work, expertise is falling out of favor (The Atlantic)

One Last Bite 😋

New OpenAI CEO on AI dangers and risk! Emmett Shear - cofounder of Twitch