The AI Breakdown First Five - Monday August 14, 2023

5. No, OpenAI Will Not Be Going Bankrupt

This weekend saw one of the sillier engagement baits on AI Twitter we’ve seen in a while. A random publication out of India published a piece warning that OpenAI could go out of business in 2024 given how much it was spending per day of operations. Breathless thinkfluencer posts followed, seemingly ignoring the truly endless amounts of capital OpenAI would have access to should it need it,. Don’t forget to be skeptical, kids.

4. A Fresh (and Strategic) $100M for Anthropic

Claude creator Anthropic has taken on a new 9-figure investment from Korean telco giant SK Telecom. From the reporting on it so far, it appears there is a partnership element to the investment, with Anthropic helping SK Telecom develop a new LLM purpose-suited for their needs.

3. Play.HT Gives Eleven Labs Some Competition

The text-to-speech and voice synthesis competition is heating up. Play.HT has just released their 2.0 model, introducing the ability to control the tonality of the synthesized voice with emotional cues. Among a sea of “more-cool-than-useful” AI tools, this is genuinely useful.

2. “Glorified Tape Recorders”

Put theoretical physicist Michio Kaku in the “AI fears are overblown” camp. In an interview with CNN’s Fareed Zakaria over the weekend, the renowned scientist was dismissive of the tools that have caused so much consternation, and argued more or less that the real powerful technological shift that was coming was the introduction of quantum computing.

1. Evil-GPT Fills Gap Left by WormGPT

When WormGPT first hit the scene a few months ago, it was all the bad-guy rage, with various nefarious types using it for sophisticated phishing attacks and other general internet malintent. The creators of WormGPT have now set up some amount of guardrails around it and are repositioning it as the best uncensored LLM, not an LLM for doing bad. Into the gap they left steps Evil-GPT, which has just started advertising to help people do..well…Evil-GPT things.

BONUS: These Agents Live In A Simulation

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Signing off from the future’s past - NLW