Today in AI: Sam Altman as CEO of OpenAI is strategic win for Nadella, What is AGI? and AWS India AI ready initiative to train people

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(Image: AFP)

Sam Altman’s OpenAI comeback is a strategic win for Satya Nadella

Committing $11 billion that gave Microsoft a 49 percent stake — and no board seat was an extraordinary gamble by Nadella, given the possibility of Altman being fired.

• OpenAI’s efforts to thread the needle between governing a for-profit company and a nonprofit organization were convoluted and doomed for its investors from the start.
• Microsoft briefly hired Altman and his OpenAI President Greg Brockman as heads of a new advanced AI division at Microsoft. As nearly all of OpenAI’s staff signed an open letter threatening to join that team, many observers in the industry saw an enormous coup for Microsoft: It had acqui-hired one of the world’s most talented AI teams for approximately zero dollars.

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What is AGI? and what does it have to do with OpenAI?

AGI is more of a general term, referring to Artificial Intelligence that has not been trained to excel in one particular task. Instead, they are autonomous systems trained be good at nearly everything.

• This also includes the ability to learn, and AGI models can teach themselves, potentially improving their capabilities even more over time. Rather than be focused on one specific task like writing greeting cards for example, an AGI can also pick out the design, the dimensions, the print quality and the paper used, all while explaining to the customer why they are paying Rs 50 extra for the fancy one.
• According to Reuters, several researchers within OpenAI sent the board of directors a letter warning them of a new discovery within AGI that could threaten humanity. This was before Sam Altman was ousted from the CEO's role.

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AWS India launches ‘AI Ready’ initiative to train 2 million people by 2025

The cloud service provider also earmarked $12 million for AWS Generative AI Scholarship, wherein it will provide Udacity scholarships to more than 50,000 high school and university students from underserved and underrepresented communities globally.

• These courses range from foundational to advanced and for business leaders and technologists, aligned to their in-demand jobs as tech and IT companies are increasing focus on AI skills-based hiring.
• Some of these courses are Introduction to Amazon CodeWhisperer, Foundations of Prompt Engineering, Low-Code Machine Learning on AWS, Building Language Models on AWS, Amazon Transcribe—Getting Started and Building Generative AI Applications Using Amazon Bedrock, to name a few.