THE NEWS

🚨97% of OpenAI employees threaten to quit

We left off yesterday with the announcement from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella that Sam Altman and Greg Brockman, who used to run OpenAI, are joining Microsoft to lead a new AI lab. Dozens of OpenAI employees have quit, ready to join them.

Meanwhile, another big piece of news broke: the OpenAI staff refused to speak with the new interim CEO, Emmett Shear, in an all-hands meeting over the weekend. Instead, they just sent a “fuck you” emoji on Slack.

Ilya Sutskever, the big brain at OpenAI, is now saying he regrets firing Sam. He tweeted about it yesterday. It looks like he's thinking they might need to patch things up with Sam to save OpenAI from falling apart.

By the end of Monday, things got even crazier. Nearly all of OpenAI's employees – 747 out of 770 – signed a letter saying they'd bail and join Microsoft unless the directors who fired Sam step down and bring him back. And Ilya? He was one of the first to sign.

The investors behind OpenAI are also up in arms, looking at legal ways to get the board to change their minds.

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Satya Nadella's playing it cool, though. In a chat with Bloomberg, he's like, ‘I'm happy to work with OpenAI and Sam, no matter where Sam ends up.’ He also reassured everyone that they would have the IP and the means to build on OpenAI’s work internally.

However Satya also told Bloomberg, Microsoft will want a governance change in OpenAI, to prevent this from happening again.

No matter what, Microsoft's in a good spot.

What’s up with the board?

Everyone was mad at Ilya over the weekend, but now they're pointing fingers at the other board members, especially Adam D’Angelo from Quora. He's involved with AI chatbot Poe, and folks are saying it's clashing with OpenAI’s new GPTs feature.

But that leaves us wondering what Tasha McCauley and Helen Toner, the other two board members, are getting out of this. They're under a lot of pressure to speak up. The OpenAI crew is united and they're ready to either fix things up or walk out. If the board doesn’t have a solid reason for their decisions, it’s going to look really bad for them.

ONE MORE THING

Runway reveals huge updates

Runway ML, the awesome AI for making animations, just got a bunch of cool new stuff. Now there's a 'Director Mode' that lets you mess around with fancy camera controls.

They’ve also introduced Gen-2 Style Presets that help keep your animation style on point, whether you're going for a grainy old-school vibe or something super sleek and glossy.

Plus, there's this new Motion Brush tool that lets you pick exactly which part of your frame gets to dance around.

These are awesome updates and great steps towards making AI films a reality.

⌚ If you have one more minute

• 🚀Amazon launches free AI classes to train two million people in AI

• 🌍Power grab by France, Germany and Italy threatens to kill EU’s AI bill

• ⏰Use of AI could create a four-day week for almost one-third of workers

AI Art of the Day 🎨

QR Code done in Roman style by u/cafeengrano with Stable Diffusion ControlNet.

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That's all for today, folks!

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