OpenAI controversy: ‘Sky’ speaks out

Plus: Cohere drops new multilingual LLMs

Welcome, AI enthusiasts.

As OpenAI continues to gear up for its highly-anticipated releases, it can’t seem to escape the constant storm of controversy.

With leaked NDA documents, new ScarJo info, and another resignation, the AI giant’s reality-TV level drama is showing no signs of slowing down. Let’s investigate…

In today’s AI rundown:

  • OpenAI controversy: ‘Sky’ speaks out

  • Cohere unveils new multilingual LLMs

  • Transfer materials from an image to a subject

Read time: 4 minutes

In today’s Duo Discover:

  • Humane seeks buyer after AI Pin launch

  • Scientists plan a head transplant system

  • How to access Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash

OPENAI

Image source: Screenshot obtained via Vox

There has been a wave of updates on several drama-filled OpenAI topics, including leaked documents related to the company’s controversial NDA clauses, new info surrounding the ‘Sky’ voice model, another resignation, and more.

  • The voice actress behind ChatGPT's 'Sky' voice has come forward, saying she was hired months before Altman contacted Scarlett Johansson.

  • Leaked documents with Sam Altman's signature contradict claims he was unaware of NDA clauses threatening to claw back former employees' equity.

  • OpenAI policy researcher Gretchen Kreuger resigned, with a post citing safety concerns about the company.

  • Teasers are coming out of presentations at the VivaTech conference, showing a potential move away from the ‘GPT-5’ name and a new Sora demo.

 For a world-altering company, OpenAI continues to have reality TV levels of drama. The mounting controversies and resignations are impossible to ignore — and it certainly feels like another November 2023 fiasco is waiting to drop, despite the hype surrounding the upcoming releases.

Looking for visuals and charts, rather than words, to understand the daily news?

Bay Area Times is a visual-based newsletter on business and tech, with 250,000+ subscribers.

COHERE

Image source: C4AI

C4AI, the non-profit research arm of Cohere, just launched Aya 23 — a family of state-of-the-art multilingual LLMs with open weights and support for 23 different languages.

  • Aya 23 has an 8B parameter model designed for efficiency and accessibility, and an advanced 35B parameter model based on the Command R architecture.

  • The models build on the previous Aya 101 initiative which covered 101 languages, now focusing more on depth.

  • Aya 23 significantly outperforms Aya 101 across a range of benchmarks, also exceeding other open rivals like Google’s Gemma and Mistral.

As AI's impact ripples across the globe, access to top models will become a make-or-break issue for many parts of the world. Democratizing access to these state-of-the-art multilingual models is a massive step towards ensuring that everyone can benefit from AI’s rapid advances.

AI TRAINING

The Rundown: Replicate's new AI model allows you to transfer materials from one image to another, creating stunning and realistic transformations in seconds.

Step-by-step:

  1. Visit the "material-transfer" model on Replicate.

  2. Select a high-quality material image and a subject image with good contrast.

  3. Upload the material image to "material_image", the subject image to "subject_image", and add a brief description of your desired image.

  4. Click "Run" and watch the AI work its magic.

What did you think of this week's issue?

We take your feedback seriously.

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

If you have specific feedback or anything interesting you’d like to share, please let us know by replying to this email.