The AI Breakdown First Five - Friday July 14, 2023

5. HuggingFace Raising at a $4B Valuation

Open source is big businesses. Reports are that “GitHub for machine learning” company HuggingFace is on the verge of closing a $200m Series D round at a $4B valuation, just a year after raising $100m at $2B. The company has reportedly increased its run rate from $10m a couple years ago to $30m-$50m this year.

4. Twitter Parent X-Corp Sues Around Data Scraping

As Elon gets more serious about AI, he also is getting more serious about not allowing third parties to scrape Twitter’s data for free. The latest front in that war is a set of reported lawsuits against unnamed defendants around exactly that sort of scraping. Could this be prelude to a bigger lawsuit against one of the big AI platforms?

3. More Accusations Levied at Stability AI CEO

The weirdness around Stability AI continues. Another cofounder has popped up, filing a lawsuit accusing CEO Emad Mostaque of tricking him into selling his 15% stake in the company just months before they raised $100M. Among other things, the co-founder says Mostaque was trying to get him to sell his shared without disclosing he was talking to VCs. Stability AI has called the lawsuit baseless and said that they will aggressively defend themselves.

2. SAG Joins Writer’s Strike After Scary AI Offer

The actors guild SAG-AFTRA has joined the Writers Guild of America in their strike. It’s the first time the two organizations have been on strike at the same time since 1960, when Ronald Reagan led the organization. One of the proposals SAG was most up in arm about had to do with AI. As described by SAG’s chief negotiator:

“This ‘groundbreaking’ AI proposal that they gave us yesterday, they proposed that our background performers should be able to be scanned, get one day’s pay, and their companies should own that scan, their image, their likeness and should be able to use it for the rest of eternity on any project they want, with no consent and no compensation. So if you think that’s a groundbreaking proposal, I suggest you think again.”

1. FTC Investigating OpenAI

The Federal Trade Commission has begun a formal investigation of OpenAI, focused on whether ChatGPT has harmed consumers with its data collection practices or through sharing false information. They also sent requests for more information about OpenAI’s safety practices and approaches to training. As of now, OpenAI has put on the “its fine, we’re cooperating” hat.

BONUS: Stable Doodle

Early founder weirdness be damned, this is a pretty rad new tool from Stability AI.

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Signing off from the future’s past - NLW