OpenAI News and Sam Altman’s Departure

The latest about OpenAI is that they announced several new models and developer products at their first DevDay on November 6, 2023. Some of the highlights are:

GPT-4 Turbo, a more capable and cheaper version of GPT-4 that supports a 128K context window and has knowledge of world events up to April 2023.

Assistants API, a new way to build assistive AI apps that have goals and can call models and tools.

Multimodal capabilities, including vision, image creation (DALL·E 3), and text-to-speech (TTS).

As for Sam Altman, he stepped down from his role as CEO of OpenAI on November 17, 2023, following a review process by the company’s board of directors. According to reports, Altman did not take any equity in OpenAI when it added the for-profit OpenAI LP entity in 2019, and he only stands to gain a fraction of his initial investment through Y Combinator67.

Altman said his lack of equity in OpenAI did not bother him because he already had enough money and was motivated by other selfish benefits, such as having impact, access, and an interesting life. He is also reportedly working on a new AI venture.