Transcript
Andrei Karpathy (0:00)
Foreign.
Jeremy Harris (0:11)
Hello and welcome to the Last Week in AI podcast. We can hear a chat about what's going on with AI. As usual in this episode we will summarize and discuss some of last week's most interesting AI news. And as sometimes we will also be discussing the news from the last last week. Unfortunately, we did miss last week. Again, we are sorry, we're going to try not to do that, but we will be going back and covering the couple of things that we missed. And as always, you can go to the episode description to get the timestamp and links to all the things we discuss. I am one of your regular hosts, Andrei Karen. I studied AI in grad school and now work at a Silicon Valley gen AI startup.
Andrei Karpathy (0:52)
And I'm your other host, Jeremy Harris. I'm with Gladstone AI, an AI national security company. And we're talking about like the last coup couple weeks. Rare that we have two weeks to catch up on, obviously. But when we do, usually what happens is God just gives us a big smack in the face and he's like, you know what, I'm gonna. We're gonna drop like GPT7 and GPT8 at the same time. And now Google DeepMind's gonna have their own thing. Sam Altman's gonna get assassinated, then he's gonna get resurrected, and then you're just gonna have to cover all this this week. These two weeks, very different. Kind of seems weirdly quiet, a bit of a reprieve. So thank you, universe.
Jeremy Harris (1:28)
Yeah, I remember there was a couple of months ago a thing where there was like grok free and llama3.7 and GPT something something. It was like everything all at once. This one. Yeah, nothing too huge in the last couple weeks. So a preview of the news we'll be covering. We're actually going to start with business this time because I think the big story of the last two weeks is OpenAI deciding it will not go for profit or controlling entity of OpenAI is not going to go for profit. Which is interesting. Going to have a few stories on tools and apps, but nothing huge there. Some new cool models to talk about in open source, some new exciting research from DeepMind dealing with algorithms in research and then policy and safety, focusing quite a bit on the policy side of things with the Trump administration and chips. And just before we dive in, do want to shout out some Apple reviews? In fact, I saw just recently there was a review where the headline is if a podcast is good, be consistent. Please be please post it consistently. As the title says, one podcast per Week. Haven't seen one in the last three weeks now. And yes, we're sorry. We tried to be consistent and I think it's been a bit of a hectic year. But in the next couple months it should be more doable for us to be weekly on this stuff. Well, let's get into it. Applications and business. And the first story is OpenAI saying that it is not gonna go through with trying to basically get rid of Visual a nonprofit that controls the for profit entity. So as we've been covering now for probably like a year or something, OpenAI has been meaning to transition away from the structure it has had since, I guess since its founding, certainly since 2019, where there is a nonprofit with mission guiding mission that has ultimate control of a for profit that is able to receive money from investors and is responsible to its investors. The nonprofit basically ultimately is responsible to the mission and not to the investors, which is a big problem for OpenAI since of course they had this whole crazy drama in late 2023 where the board fired Sam Altman briefly that I think spooked investors and etc. Etc. So now we get here several months. I think we started late 2024. Ish. There was a lot of litigation initially prompted I think by Elon Musk, basically lawsuits saying that this is not okay, that you can't just change from nonprofit to for profit when you got some money while you were a nonprofit. And yeah, it looks like OpenAI backed down basically after apparently dialogue with the Attorney General of Delaware and the Attorney General of California and what they say is discussions with civic leaders and attorney generals. They are keeping the non profit. They are still changing some things. So the subsidiary you could say will transition to being a public benefit corporation. The same thing that Anthropic and XAI are basically a for profit with a little asterisk that you want to be doing your for profit stuff for public good. That does mean they'll be able to do some sort of share thing. I think that does imply that they are able to give out shares. The nonprofit will receive some sort of stake in this new public benefit corporation. So yeah, to me, I was pretty surprised when I saw this. I thought OpenAI was going to keep fighting it, that they had some chance of being able to beat it given their position. But yeah, seems like they were just kind of defeated in court.
