Techmeme
November 30, 2023, 7:40 AM

Top News

Rachel Metz / Bloomberg:
In a blog post, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Ilya Sutskever won't be a board member, but the company is “discussing how he can continue his work at OpenAI”  —  - Sam Altman is officially back as CEO of the AI startup  — Mira Murati will retain her post as chief technology officer
Alex Heath / The Verge:
OpenAI adds Microsoft as a non-voting observer on the nonprofit board that controls OpenAI, and makes Sam Altman's return as CEO official  —  Sam Altman is officially OpenAI's CEO again.  —  Just before Thanksgiving, the company said it had reached a deal in principle for him to return, and now it's done.
Alex Heath / The Verge:
Q&A with Sam Altman on his firing, returning to OpenAI, improving its governance, Q*, lessons from the saga, and more; Altman does not say why he was fired  —  “Clearly our governance structure had a problem,” according to Altman. … When OpenAI's board asked Sam Altman to return …
Lora Kolodny / CNBC:
Elon Musk dismisses fear of advertisers leaving X after his controversial posts: “If somebody's gonna try to blackmail me with advertising ... go fuck yourself”  —  - In recent weeks, Musk has promoted and sometimes verbally endorsed what the White House called “antisemitic and racist hate” …
More: The Hollywood Reporter, Engadget, Axios, Financial Times, 9to5Mac, Livemint, Variety, CNN, TweakTown, Fortune, Social Media Today, CoinGape, Wall Street Journal, The Overspill, MacDailyNews, Wired, The Hill, The Verge, MobileSyrup, IGN, TechCrunch, PCMag, AppleInsider, Cointelegraph, Washington Post, Watcher Guru, NBC News, Bitcoin Insider, and The Verge
Forums: r/elonmusk and r/Destiny
Jacob Kastrenakes / The Verge:
Elon Musk calls his November 15 X post a mistake that “handed a loaded gun to those who hate me and arguably to those who are antisemitic”, for which he's sorry  —  I should in retrospect not have replied to that one person and should have written in greater length what i meant.
Kim Masters / The Hollywood Reporter:
Alex Ivanovs / Stack Diary:
Researchers develop a “divergence attack” that makes ChatGPT emit sequences copied from its training data, by prompting the LLM to repeat a word numerous times  —  Large language models, like ChatGPT, are trained on vast amounts of text data from books, websites, and other sources.
CBC News:
Google and Canada reach an agreement in their dispute over the country's Online News Act; Google plans to pay news companies around CA$100M, or ~$74M, per year  —  Agreement comes 3 weeks before Online News Act rules come into force  —  Google and the federal government have reached …
Eddie Makuch / GameSpot:
At an event, Xbox CFO Tim Stuart says Microsoft wants to bring Xbox Game Pass to PlayStation, Nintendo, and “every screen that can play games”  —  “It's a bit of a change of strategy,” Microsoft admits.  —  Microsoft wants to bring Xbox Game Pass to PlayStation and Nintendo.
Emilia David / The Verge:
At re:Invent, AWS unveils Model Evaluation on Bedrock in preview to help companies evaluate AI models before use, with human testers involved in the process  —  Amazon wants users to evaluate AI models better and encourage more humans to be involved in the process.
Kyle Wiggers / TechCrunch:
Lawrence Abrams / BleepingComputer:
The US sanctions Sinbad, a crypto mixer allegedly used by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group, and the US, the Netherlands, and Poland seize the service  —  The U.S. Department of the Treasury has sanctioned the Sinbad cryptocurrency mixing service for its use as a money-laundering tool by the North Korean Lazarus hacking group.
Todd Spangler / Variety:
Netflix plans to add Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy to its mobile app, the App Store, and Google Play on December 14, available to its users at no extra charge  —  The three classic titles in “Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy - The Definitive Edition" will be available Dec. 14 for Netflix customers …
Olga Kharif / Bloomberg:
SoFi tells its crypto customers to liquidate their accounts or move holdings to Blockchain.com by December 19, as it exits crypto due to regulatory scrutiny  —  - Customers have to move by Dec. 19 or liquidate their coins … The San Francisco-based company told crypto customers Wednesday …
Taylor Lorenz / Washington Post:
Substack rolls out video creation and editing tools to enable creators to publish video podcasts, create interactive AI-made transcripts, and customize clips  —  Content creators are launching original shows on Substack as the company introduces a suite of new video tools
Ryan Gallagher / Bloomberg:
Google TAG executive Kate Morgan says Google observed a “massive increase” in Chinese cyberattacks on Taiwan in the last six months from over 100 groups  —  - Company has observed a ‘massive increase’ in China's attacks  — Government-sponsored hackers targeting government and industry
More: Gizchina

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