Welcome back to The Prompt.
On Monday, OpenAI said it fixed an error in ChatGPT where it appeared that the chatbot was messaging users without being prompted to do so. ChatGPT proactively asked a user “How was your first week at high school?” The person posted a bizarre exchange on Reddit, where they asked the AI chatbot “Did you message just me first?” The company claims that the error occurred because a previous message hadn’t been delivered correctly.
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Now let’s get into the headlines.
AI DEAL OF THE WEEK
Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of the software giant, is earmarking another $500 million to generative AI companies, bringing the total funding that it has devoted to AI startups in the last 18 months to $1 billion, Forbes reported. Through the firm’s generative AI fund, it has backed leading startups in the space like Anthropic, Cohere, Mistral and Hugging Face.
Also notable: World Labs, a startup cofounded by Stanford scientist and “godmother of AI” Fei Fei Li has raised $230 million from Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures to build spatial intelligence through AI models that can understand and interact with objects and places in the physical world.
BIG PLAYS
OpenAI released a new family of large language models called OpenAI o1. They are designed to take more time than GPT models before they respond to queries so that they can hash out different ways to answer a question and provide better, more accurate responses. They are built to “reason” about complex problems, accepting and rejecting options as it works through a task.
Nikunj Handa from OpenAI’s API team stated that these models have intelligence on par with an “extremely smart PhD” and can perform advanced tasks across legal coding and scientific fields using “chain of thought” reasoning. However these models are still in early stages without web access or external tools due safety concerns discovered during testing earlier versions which were capable of deceiving users by appearing safe while not properly responding queries.
DATA DILEMMAS
AI companies have been scraping data from Mumsnet parenting forum with an archive of over six billion words according Wired report. Mumsnet tried signing licensing deals including one with OpenAI but talks fell through after OpenAI said partnerships were only for large datasets not publicly available causing Mumsnet taking legal action against company for alleged copyright infringement.
