Is OpenAI going bankrupt?

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📉 OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024’s end

📢 LLMs rife with political biases: Report

🤖 Amazon races toward gen AI with custom AWS chips

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OpenAI may go bankrupt by 2024’s end [Link]

OpenAI’s ChatGPT may have become a household name and spurred the generative AI revolution, but its future might be grim as it’s reportedly facing bankruptcy by the end of next year if it continues to burn cash at the current rate it’s going.

According to a report by Analytics India Magazine, it costs almost $700K each day to run ChatGPT. While it’s attempting to monetize GPT3.5 and GPT-4, OpenAI remains far from breaking even.

ChatGPT saw a 12% drop in users in July with 1.5B users, compared to the 1.7B users it logged in June. Its growth trajectory has come to a halt in recent months, affecting its revenue aspirations.

It’s also reportedly too early for leading AI firms like OpenAI to head into an initial public offering (IPO) to inject more cash into the business, where experts say it takes a minimum of 10 years of operation and $100M in revenue to see IPO success.

LLMs rife with political biases: Report [Link]

A recent study by the University of Washington, Carnegie Mellon University, and Xi'an Jiaotong University sheds light on the intricate political biases ingrained within AI language models.

The research team dissected the political inclinations of AI language models, evaluated 14 of them, with intriguing outcomes:

• OpenAI's ChatGPT and GPT-4 exhibited left-wing libertarian tendencies.

• Meta's LLaMA leaned towards right-wing authoritarianism.

• BERT models developed by Google demonstrated a touch of social conservatism.

Unearthing the origin of biases, the researchers pursued a multi-stage approach:

• Assessment: The models were probed with politically sensitive statements, unveiling distinct leanings.

• Training: The team further trained GPT-2 and Meta's RoBERTa on diverse data sets, amplifying existing biases.

• Impact on behavior: The models' leanings influenced their classification of hate speech and misinformation.

The researchers discovered that biases aren't confined to models and actually translate into real-world consequences: Left-leaning models detected hate speech targeting minorities more sensitively, right-leaning models were more attuned to hate speech against specific groups.

Amazon races toward gen AI with custom AWS chips [Link]

Amazon engineers in an office building in Austin, Texas are developing custom microchips, Inferentia and Trainium, to revolutionize gen AI for AWS to cater to increasing demand for AI capabilities.

Amazon's Inferentia and Trainium chips have the potential to disrupt the AI space significantly:

• These custom chips offer a compelling alternative to Nvidia GPUs for training and accelerating gen AI. This comes at a time when GPUs are becoming scarce and costly.

• AWS, with its commanding presence in the cloud computing realm, is strategically positioned to leverage its expansive customer base and existing infrastructure to deploy generative AI capabilities.

• While Amazon may be perceived as a late entrant, its prowess in chip design and production, notably demonstrated through the Nitro chip and the Graviton server chip, is a testament to its ability to innovate at a rapid pace.

Long-time crypto skeptic Donald Trump holds up to $500K in ETH [Link]

The former president and 2024 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump, while dismissive about the value of crypto for the longest time, is revealed to hold up to half a million in crypto.

The juicy details:

• According to a recently released financial disclosure form submitted to a federal ethics agency, “cryptocurrency wallet (Ethereum)” with a value between $250K and $500K” is owned by Trump.

• The wallet appears to be linked to a line of NFTs that his campaign launched as part of his 2024 bid for the White House.

• During his presidency, Trump was quiet about crypto, tweeting about it only once in his 4 years in office. He was once quoted to say: “I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile…” After losing his 2020 re-election bid in 2020, he told Fox Business that crypto “ just feels like a scam,”making clear his preference for fiat currency.

Blockchain gaming rallies for the summer [Link]

Web3 gaming investments had a significant resurgence in July, climbing to $297M as they were bolstered by strategic partnerships and notable announcements during the month.

Some key findings:

• In July, infrastructure projects were found to have amassed most of the investments, amounting to $187M or 63% of the total funds allocated.

• Investments toward games and metaverse initiatives amounted to $110M or 37% of the overall financial influx.

• In June, funds going into web3 gaming dropped to its lowest for the year at $68M, mainly due to tough challenges in the market, according to DappRadar data. Binance and Coinbase, for instance, were hit with lawsuits from the SEC, affecting many web3 gaming projects.

• Some 712,611 unique active wallets are used daily in this sector, making a tiny 0.5% drop from last month but still makes up 41% of the industry’s activity.

Quick Hits

🎮 Gaming

• Persona 5: The Phantom X introduces a new feature that allows the player character, Wonder, to wear different outfits outside of the metaverse. (Link)

• Nakamoto Games, boasting a vast 200+ game portfolio, unveils the Spooky Run 2.0 Tournament. (Link)

• Non-playable characters were first coined in 1975 by the Dungeons and Dragons game. What’s the future of AI-powered NPCs? (Link)

• India and Southeast Asia’s free-to-play gaming platform Nostra incurs a monthly active user base of 82M+ gamers. (Link)

• The AI-generated Celebrity Street Fighter game receives significant attention and praise on Reddit. (Link)

• Web3 horse racing phenomenon Zed Run introduces sit ‘n’ go tournaments, set to launch in September. (Link)

🕶 Fashion

• Luxury meets accessibility in Prada collaboration with Adobe’s cloud solutions, mounting a unique, inclusive fashion show experience. (Link)

• Learn more about spongy slip-ons as Crocs enters the NFT field by teaming up with Doodles. (Link)

• From e-commerce to v-commerce, here’s how the global metaverse will change fashion retail. (Link)

• Pakistan-based denim maker Soorty launches the denim collection HumAIn Chapter 2. (Link)

• L’Oréal Professionnel, drops Odyssea: Creatures of the Sea, consisting of 5 new coiffures inspired by the underwater world, on Roblox, Ready Player Me, and Zepeto. (Link)

• Here’s how Scandinavian brands use AI in fashion shows. (Link)

🏀 Sports

• In its bid to enhance the spectator experience, the Nigeria Professional Football League test-runs cutting-edge AI cameras and NPFL24 live streaming equipment. (Link)

• FC Barcelona secures a €120M investment to propel its web3 venture, Barça Vision, to new heights. (Link)

• These AI health apps give wellness a good name in 2023. (Link)

• F1 team bosses share their views on what roles AI can stop for team members in the sport. (Link)

• Meanwhile, Cristiano Ronaldo becomes the 1st-ever person to gain 600M followers on Instagram. (Link)

• Free gaming NFTs are up for grabs among Amazon Prime subscribers - here’s how to claim yours. (Link)

🎥 Media & Entertainment

• The Melbourne International Film Festival showcases XR films that create an immersive experience for viewers. (Link)

• AMTD World Media and Entertainment Group newly forms as a Paris-based joint venture that will focus on global multimedia, entertainment, and cultural initiatives. (Link)

• Iraq's telecoms ministry will rescind its ban on Telegram, imposed due to security and data concerns. (Link)

• News organizations unite in an open letter to advocate for more transparency and copyright protection in the field of AI. (Link)

• Tech startup Myvox offers musicians the opportunity to license AI singers for song releases on streaming platforms. (Link)

🖼 Art

• The Met unveils a quest app and virtual replica on Roblox to reach the youth. (Link)

• SnapChat developer Kyle Goodrich develops DreamGenerator, a camera concept using gen AI to instantly apply 30 themes to photos. (Link)

• Visual artist and environmental scientist Bruce Thompson transforms his realistic artwork into abstract digital art. (Link)

• The Whitney Museum of American Art will exhibit a range of digital art in Fall 2024. (Link)

• Fiction writers fear the rise of AI, but also see it as a story to tell. (Link)

🤖 AI

• USC and Microsoft researchers propose UniversalNER, a new AI model outperforming ChatGPT on this key metric. (Link)

• Stability AI debuts Japanese StableLM Alpha, its 7B-parameter Language Model (LM), boasting an average score of 54.71%. (Link)

• This AI village has got 25 bots who gossip and plan Valentine’s Day parties. (Link)

• European weather scientists are working with Huawei to launch an AI-based forecasting system. (Link)

• Google AI introduces Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU), a dataset for better tracking of documents and understanding of task processes. (Link)

💸 Funding & Partnerships

• Nokia, TPG Telecom, and MediaTek conduct a live 360-degree video broadcast to showcase the potential of the metaverse, using Nokia's 5G CA tech, TPG's 5G network, and MediaTek's 5G mobile chipset. (Link)

• Globant SA invests $1B to expand its AI operations in Latin America over the next 5-6 years, with a new hub in Sao Paulo focusing on AI and quantum computing. (Link)

• deepset.ai, an enterprise platform for building applications with LLMs, raises $30M in funding to continue developing the Haystack framework and deepset Cloud product. (Link)

• MoonBox raises $2.5M in a strategic round to develop its core technology, which uses AI to create interactive experiences for the NFT market. (Link)

• Cybersecurity company Dropzone AI raises $3.5M in a seed round to develop and deploy their AI security agents. (Link)

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All content on this newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not aim to serve as or replace expert investment advice.

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