First, OpenAI Board Outsed Altman & Brockman. 5 Days Later, They’re Back.

Another OpenAI Banger On Thanksgiving Week. Popc…Turkey Anyone? 🦃 

• Sam Altman to return as CEO of OpenAI

• Binance Founder Pleads Guilty to Violating Money Laundering Rules

• IBM Watsonx - A game changer for embedding generative AI into commercial solutions

• Weekly productivity hacks

• Quick snips of other AI updates

Read time: 7 minutes

Sam Altman to return as CEO of OpenAI

On November 16-17, the board of OpenAI announced their jaw-dropping decisions to fire Sam Altman (previous CEO), and demote Greg Brockman (previous board chairman, who later resigned) to president. Mind you, both of them are co-founders of OpenAI, and naturally their names carry substantial weights and respect in the industry.

It was reported that Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, was furious after learning the news. The company pledged to invest $10 bn in OpenAI, but reportedly doesn’t have a seat on the board. Oh.

Fast forward a few days, OpenAI announced Emmett Shear, the co-founder of Twitch, to assume the position of CEO, because the board deemed the extensive experience of Shear in a video-streaming platform would be valuable to an AI development company. And OpenAI will steer its way to streaming in the near future. 747 OpenAI employees, out of their 770 workforce, published a letter threatening to quit, unless the board resigns and Altman reinstated. Investors of OpenAI also publicly voiced their support for Altman, including Khosla Ventures and Microsoft.

Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, asked OpenAI researchers to send their CVs and said will match their current salaries. While Shear said he would hire an independent investigator to investigate “the entire process leading up to this point” and push for “significant governance changes if necessary”.

And just when you thought the fiesta is over, in a statement released on late November 22, the company announced the return of Altman & Brockman, despite previously confirmed that the duo will head a new AI unit at Microsoft. Several board members were removed, including Helen Toner, one of the board members who orchestrated Altman’s ousting. While representative from Microsoft will likely join the board.

⚡️Insights:

Biggest winner:

Altman & Brockman - The letter from OpenAI employees is the most powerful endorsement someone could possibly ask for. To misjudge the situation that poorly, and have 747 employee out of their 770 turning against you, that says something about the previous management’s abilities and visions. All of this leading up to Altman & Brockman hitting the home run and announcing their return, there can be no sweeter comeback.

Biggest loser:

Previous OpenAI management - In their announcement of removing Altman, they gave the typical ambiguous PR answer, accusing Altman of not being "consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities."

It seems this is the only narrative that they could cling onto, as evidenced by Shear’s attempted damage control, as if suggesting that “significant governance changes if necessary” is at the core of the current turmoil.

Helen Toner, after getting removed from the board tweeted “And now, we all get some sleep.” But all she got is out.

Binance Founder Pleads Guilty to Violating Money Laundering Rules

The founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, pleaded guilty to money laundering violations. As part of the plea deal, Zhao agreed to pay a $50 million fine and step down as the company's chief executive. Binance itself also pleaded guilty and agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines and restitution to the government.

Binance will have a government monitor overseeing its operations, and Zhao is barred from any involvement in the company until three years after the monitor is appointed.

The court documents revealed various attempts by Zhao and other senior Binance employees to evade laws, including those related to customer identity verification, anti-money laundering, and sanctions compliance. Binance was found to have allowed illicit actors to transact freely, including those involved in child sexual abuse, illegal narcotics, and terrorism.

The settlement imposed on Binance is one of the largest ever imposed by the U.S. government on a financial firm. Banks will have to cut off access to Binance and Zhao, while being granted bail, could face up to 18 months in prison.

⚡️Insights:

After the FTX implosion, now the biggest cryptocurrency exchange is finally dealt a major blow. It certainly does not help with investor’s confidence in the crypto space, on top of the still shaky macroeconomic landscape.

To put forth a cynical take, why would crypto players expect "decentralization" to materialize when crucial transactions involving commodities like oil are mostly conducted in USD? It is through this mechanism that countries exert power on the global stage.

That's not to say crypto cannot eventually become a mainstream means of transaction, but it is highly likely that regulators will thoroughly scrutinize and regulate the product in the years to come. This raises the question of whether it will still retain the characteristics and functions that we currently associate with it.

🧠 Extended Read:

Binance Former CEO Zhao’s Tweet Post-US Court Ruling

Watsonx: A game changer for embedding generative AI into commercial solutions

On the other side of the AI industry, IBM is quietly building up its AI repertoire helping businesses to incorporate AI in their workflows more seamlessly.

Watsonx comprises of three components, and each of them aiming to reduce the need for specialized talent and resources:

• watsonx.ai - offers intuitive tooling for powerful foundation models

• watsonx.data - enables compute-efficient, scalable workloads wherever data resides; and the third component

• watsonx.governance - provides guardrails essential to responsible implementation

IBM not only offers AI functionalities such as text summarization, sentiment analysis, content generation, information extraction, and question-answering. But also provides support in solution architecture, monetization strategies, technical resources, and sales collaboration.

⚡️Insights:

The development of IBM Watsonx is worth noting because we’re seeing another form of AI development here, where tech companies are not focusing on the efficiency and cost, but rather the user-friendliness and support that it provides to the business partners.

This empowers a wider variety of start-ups, versus the ChatGPT plug and play model that’s so prevalent, which is evidently unsustainable whenever OpenAI announces a newer and better engine of ChatGPT. Instead, IBM’s approach is to help start-ups on a practical business level, to help them get up and running through monetization strategies and sales collaboration.

You’ve probably heard of the Memory Palace, but never really looked into a step-by-step guide on how to actually do it. So here you go:

Step 1: Pick what you want to memorize.

Step 2: Pick a place that you know very well in your mind, and pick a route. For example, if you pick your home, start from the front door, then the kitchen, then the living room, then the bedroom.

Step 3: Assign the list of things you want to memorize to the objects along the path. Picture something silly if it helps your memorizing!

Step 4: Practice more at first and slowly decrease the number of visits to your palace to solidify your memory.

📢 Announcement: Papercut will discontinue its coverage on OpenAI until 2035.

New ways to find just what you need on Google Search - Link

Nvidia just ended an earnings recession and is helping to reshape corporate profits - Link

Jeff Bezos expected to sell more Amazon shares worth $1 billion - Link

Amazon’s offering free courses on generative AI - Link

That’s It For This Week, Catch Y’all Same Time Next Week!