Apple sues OpenAI, alleging stolen trade secrets
What every angry CEO is thinking about AI
Apple sues OpenAI, alleging stolen trade secrets
What every angry CEO is thinking about AI
In AI, nothing ever happens. Wait, it’s happening!
Making AI actually work day to day is becoming its own job.
On July 16, hear from three people doing it: Simone Santiago Broad (Yoco), Yelva Espinoza (Zumba Fitness), and Fin’s Dave Lynch. They’ll share what the role really looks like, how it came to exist, the skills worth hiring for, and the challenges they’re tackling right now. Bring your questions, since the best moments happen live.
Apple sues OpenAI, alleging stolen trade secrets
Tech giant Apple sued ChatGPT-maker OpenAI on Friday, alleging the artificial intelligence company stole its trade secrets as part of efforts to build out a competing hardware business. “This case is about Apple’s former employees stealing Apple’s trade secrets for the benefit of OpenAI. Apple brings this suit to put a stop to it,” Apple’s lawyers said in a complaint filed in federal court in the Northern District of California. The complaint alleges that OpenAI leaders asked Apple employees to share information, including showcasing parts of new devices, during hiring interviews. OpenAI’s head of hardware, former Apple vice president....
What every angry CEO is thinking about AI
Alex Karp—describing himself as a “madman”—has brought the simmering tension between fast-rising AI giants and established tech players to a boil. In both nuanced and dramatic fashion, the Palantir Technologies chief executive is drawing attention to concerns over the power and insight AI labs derive from their business customers’ data and decision-making—the magic sauce behind what makes a company successful. Karp’s more emotional TV appearance the week before, when he declared that “something has gone completely wrong” in the relationship between AI labs and their customers. Speaking at a frenetic pace, the tech company boss rattled on....
In AI, nothing ever happens. Wait, it’s happening!
Here’s a brief and partial timeline of narrative oscillations. In 2022, ChatGPT arrives and sets the cycle in motion. It’s happening. By early 2023, AI researchers are quitting tech companies and advocating for pauses. Microsoft and OpenAI publish a paper called “Sparks of AGI,” arguing that the upcoming GPT-4 is “an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence system,” thrusting the term into mainstream use. It’s so happening. Later that year, after millions of people have used ChatGPT, and competitors start showing up, the mood changes. There are whispers of a plateau, and people start talking about practicality and open source. There’s early talk of a bubble from insiders. Nothing ever happens. But within a few months, Sam Altman is briefly fired by his safety-aware board, sparking rumors of something big coming. It’s 2024. AI video generation gets much better, which is aesthetically shocking, and a former OpenAI employee publishes an influential AGI-is-near paper. It’s happening. But wait….
Microsoft’s bets on becoming the Swiss Army knife of enterprise AI
The tech giant announced on Thursday that it is investing $2.5 billion in a new business unit, Microsoft Frontier, aimed at getting customers to better use its AI to transform their businesses and to address an area where many companies are struggling: delivering measurable outcomes and demonstrating a return on their AI investments. The unit will consist of 6,000 so-called forward-deployed engineers, or industry experts who will work directly with customers. Amazon, Anthropic and OpenAI have all announced groups for AI deployments this year….
Microsoft Frontier Co
Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft’s commercial business, said the Forward Deployed Engineers effort stems from the realization that “customers are in very different places right now, and trying to really figure out AI.” Althoff credits data analytics software vendor Palantir with popularizing the FDE job title. The U.S. military, which keeps forward deployed forces abroad, has long relied on Palantir software, and the company sent FDEs to U.S. bases in Afghanistan, according to the prospectus for its 2020 direct listing….
Microsoft launches firm to help companies adopt AI
Judson Althoff, CEO of Microsoft Commercial Business, said the new firm was born partly out of Microsoft’s own experience when models such as China’s DeepSeek and Google’s Gemini began to catch up to OpenAI. “Three years ago, when we built Copilot, we made a mistake by binding it to OpenAI models only,” Althoff told Reuters. “You wanted models to amplify your intelligence and be able to have that sort of swappability for state-of-the-art and fine-tuning.” The combination of data and the models mattered more….