Ilya Sutskever is not done working on AI safety yet

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This week, Ilya Sutskever launched a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI), just a month after formally leaving OpenAI. Sutskever, together with Jan Leike, was an integral part of OpenAI’s efforts to improve AI safety with the rise of ‘super-intelligent’ AI systems. Yet both Sutskever and Leike left the company after a dramatic fallout with leadership over how to approach AI safety.

In EV news, Fisker has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, ending months of problems with its Ocean SUV, including recalls and dozens of lemon lawsuits. This is the second car company named after himself that Henrik Fisker has declared bankrupt. His first attempt began in 2007 and filed for bankruptcy protection in 2013.

Change Healthcare confirmed this week that a ransomware attack in February resulted in the theft of medical records, affecting a “substantial portion of people in America.” The company processes patient insurance and billing for thousands of hospitals, pharmacies and medical practices and has access to vast amounts of health information on about a third of all Americans.

News

The Department of Justice vs. Adobe: The US Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Adobe, alleging the company is hiding termination fees and making it difficult to cancel subscriptions. read more

OpenAI acquires Rockset: OpenAI announced it has acquired Rockset, which builds tools to power real-time search and data analytics, as the company continues to invest in its enterprise sales and technology organizations. read more

Buttons are back: Clicks has released a nostalgic, BlackBerry-esque phone case that adds a keyboard with physical buttons to the bottom of your iPhone. We were allowed to try one ourselves. read more

Where humans and AI coexist: Butterflies is a social network where humans and AI communicate with each other through messages, comments, and DMs in an effort to have more creative relationships with AI. read more

Apple eliminates Pay Later: After launching at the end of March 2023, Apple’s Pay Later feature will no longer be available. Instead, Apple Pay users can access loans through a partnership with third-party app Affirm. read more

Beware, Outlook users: A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts appear credible and more likely to deceive their targets. read more

Bewilderment takes on Google: The AI-powered search launcher now returns results for factual questions such as the weather and time in a place, currency conversion, and answers to simple math questions, directly through maps. read more

Runway Reveals Gen-3: The company’s latest AI model for video generation delivers a “major” speed improvement, as well as greater control over the structure, style and motion of the videos generated. read more

Analysis

What should AI look like?: From black holes to colorful blobs, rendering AI in user interfaces can be challenging. While the approaches differ from branding that is ostensibly all-seeing, all-knowing, and all-doing intelligence, Devin Coldewey explores how companies have coalesced around the idea that the avatar of AI should be non-threatening, abstract, but relatively simple and non-anthropomorphic. read more

Why Fisker Failed: As Fisker files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, many are wondering what’s next for the ill-fated EV startup. Sean O’Kane argues that whatever happens to Fisker or its assets won’t change the fundamental problem: that the company wasn’t ready to grapple with bringing a defective car to market. read more

Pushing ChatGPT’s Cultural Boundaries: The current ChatGPT offers answers that are too general for specific questions targeting certain communities, as the training seems Eurocentric and Western in nature. Because most AI models aren’t built with people of color in mind, Dominic-Madori Davis and Tage Kene-Okafor report on Black’s chatbots and ChatGPT versions that specifically target Black and brown communities — and help founders benefit of OpenAI’s cultural slip. read more