Friday Links: Altman is back and AI Video takes a step forward

This week, AI turned into a family drama show and ended with Sam Altman back in charge at OpenAI (but who knows what could happen by Monday! This week’s links. There are just four this week since the drama saturated the news channels!:

• Sam Altman is back as CEO of OpenAI. After a week of chaos, OpenAI is back with the same CEO and a changed board configuration. Sidestepping the corporate reasons for Sam’s firing, the whole incident really shows how critical the leadership at AI Companies is. Thousands of companies were suddenly in a tailspin about whether or not their AI initiatives would be able to count on the platform.
• Meta demos a significantly higher-resolution image creation system. Video generation is a lot harder than image generation. The Emu-video demo is impressive (try the demo and select prompts to generate new videos). These are still short, constrained videos, but presumably, the main use case is for Facebook clips and ads. In that regard, Meta is nailing the use case. Stability AI is also in the race.
• Music Sampling and AI. This is a fascinating article deep diving into the use and attribution of music samples + those who track down unannounced samples. AI will make it easier to identify usage, but it’s a complex grey area as to what is really legal.
• Microsoft is also betting on its own AI chips. Chip mania continues with NVIDIA having another extreme earnings quarter. The trend towards custom silicon at large cloud providers like Microsoft is interesting, though. How much differentiation will this truly buy? How durable will that advantage be? My guess is that it shows ship designs today are far from optimal and having narrower use-cases is highly beneficial. However, they may get outpaced by general progress again in a few years.

Have a great weekend (and Thanksgiving weekend if you are celebrating)!