After a seven-year-long stint at OpenAI, Lilian Weng, VP of research and safety at the company, announced her departure, adding to a series of exits from the AI startup amid concerns about its prioritization of financial gains over safety. Weng, who led OpenAI's safety systems team, highlighted her pride in the team's accomplishments, especially following the dissolution of the Superalignment team earlier this year, which included the departure of Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike. OpenAI has told TechCrunch that work is already underway to find a replacement for Weng.
The US Department of Commerce has ordered major semiconductor manufacturer TSMC to halt shipments of advanced AI chips, specifically those 7nm or smaller, to Chinese clients beginning Monday. This restriction follows a recent discovery of a TSMC-made chip found in Huawei's Ascend AI processor, which violates US export controls. TSMC has notified affected clients of the new rule already, which allows the US to bypass the formal rule-making process to impose licensing requirements on certain companies quicker as China continues to struggle to gain access to advanced AI and GPU tech.
Elon Musk's AI startup, xAI, is reportedly testing out a free version of its Grok AI chatbot as multiple researchers and users on the X social media app posted about a free version of Grok being made available to people in certain regions, such as New Zealand. Though the usage rates are supposed to be very stringent, xAI does seem to be allowing non-Premium subscribers to take the Grok-2 and Grok-2 mini models out for a spin along with limited image generation capabilities, powered by Black Forest Labs' FLUX.1 model.
AlphaFold 3, Google DeepMind's most advanced and capable protein structure prediction AI model, was unexpectedly released as open-source along with its model weights on GitHub. The release comes just weeks after AlphaFold 3 played a crucial role in winning the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry and marks a huge milestone in speeding up scientific discovery and drug development. Researchers across the globe can now leverage AlphaFold 3 for academic use under the Creative Commons License.
Google has recently introduced Learn About, an experimental AI tool based on its educational LearnLM model, which provides answers with more visual and interactive elements as part of Google’s push to make AI responses more educational and meaningful. Unlike Gemini and ChatGPT, Google's feature emphasizes learning-focused content with additional contextual boxes, vocabulary definitions, and links for more learning. Prompting Learn About to answer a question like "how big is the universe" would give a structured answer with images from Physics Forums, related topics, and context such as "why it matters."
UK-based AI startup Cogna recently raised $15 million in Series A funding, led by Notion Capital, to boost the development of its AI-driven enterprise software, led by the technical co-founder of self-driving startup FiveAI, Ben Peters. The company's AI platform aims to simplify enterprise resource planning (ERP) by creating custom software for complex organizational needs. Instead of traditional ERP solutions, Cogna uses generative AI to build tailored SaaS tools that customers like Cadent Gas and Network Plus find more accessible.