In today’s newsletter:

• News - 🤯 Zuckerberg Blocks OpenAI’s For-Profit Plans, Sides with Elon Musk!

• Culture - 💔 Former OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead in SF

🤯 Zuckerberg Blocks OpenAI’s For-Profit Plans, Sides with Elon Musk!

The battle over OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company is heating up, with Meta urging California's attorney general to block the move, siding with Elon Musk in a high-stakes Silicon Valley showdown. In a letter, Meta argued that OpenAI’s shift sets a dangerous precedent, allowing startups to leverage nonprofit perks before going for-profit and reaping the financial rewards. Musk, who co-founded OpenAI but left in 2018 amid a power struggle, has been vocal about his objections, claiming the organization betrayed its original nonprofit mission and colluded with Microsoft to dominate the AI space.

Meta, a major OpenAI competitor, has thrown its weight behind Musk, even endorsing him and business associate Shivon Zilis as public advocates for the case. OpenAI, meanwhile, has published internal documents to counter Musk’s claims, revealing he initially supported for-profit models and proposed taking majority control before walking away. With OpenAI now valued at $157 billion after a $6.6 billion funding round, this feud isn’t just about ethics—it’s a power struggle shaping the future of AI, with the biggest players in Silicon Valley taking sides.

🗞️ In Other News…

• Elon Musk's AI startup xAI announced that its updated Grok-2 chatbot is now free for all X users, with Premium subscribers enjoying higher usage limits and early access to new features.

• Sundar Pichai defended Google's approach to training AI models by highlighting its licensing agreements, such as with Reddit, and argued that the evolving business model around AI data use must balance fair compensation for creators with innovation.

• Mary Louis's lawsuit against SafeRent led to a $2.3 million settlement and a five-year ban on its discriminatory AI scoring system, which allegedly penalized Black and Hispanic renters using housing vouchers by prioritizing irrelevant credit factors over guaranteed payments.

• Trump’s Silicon Valley advisers, including Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, are pushing back against AI "censorship," claiming tech companies like Google and OpenAI skew AI chatbots to reflect liberal biases, and are advocating for a more truthful, less politically correct approach to AI responses.

• Former OpenAI scientist Ilya Sutskever predicted at NeurIPS that AI will evolve beyond current pre-training methods, leading to superintelligent, reasoning machines that are both more capable and increasingly unpredictable.

💔 Former OpenAI Whistleblower Found Dead in SF

Suchir Balaji, a former OpenAI researcher turned whistleblower, was tragically found dead in his San Francisco apartment on November 26, with authorities ruling his death a suicide. Balaji, just 26, had publicly criticized OpenAI in recent months, alleging the company’s practices—especially its use of copyrighted data to train ChatGPT—violated the law. His high-profile interview with The New York Times in October shed light on his concerns about how AI technologies like ChatGPT could harm the internet. OpenAI, currently facing multiple lawsuits over its data-gathering practices, issued a statement expressing deep sadness over his passing.

Balaji, who grew up in Cupertino and studied computer science at UC Berkeley, left OpenAI in August after four years, citing his decision to work on personal projects. His allegations have sparked wider debates as US and Canadian news publishers, along with prominent writers like John Grisham, accuse OpenAI of illegally using their content to train its models. OpenAI defends its approach, stating that its practices are based on "fair use" principles designed to balance innovation and creator rights. Balaji’s story is a sobering reminder of the ethical and legal tensions shaping the AI industry.

VC Fundraising Rounds

• Vapi, a San Francisco-based platform for deploying Voice AI agents, has raised $20 million in Series A funding. (12/11/24)

• RapidCanvas, a B2B platform leveraging artificial intelligence to automate tasks, has secured $16 million in funding. (12/11/24)

• Speak, a leading global platform for AI-driven language learning, has raised $78 million in Series C funding, reaching a $1 billion valuation. (12/10/24)

• Astrix Security, a trusted provider of enterprise solutions for securing non-human identities (NHIs), has raised $45 million in its Series B funding round. (12/10/24)

• WaveForms AI has secured $40 million in funding to advance its AI audio software, which enhances machine interactions by detecting emotional cues. (12/10/24)

• Aqemia, a French startup combining "quantum-inspired physics" with machine learning to accelerate drug discovery, has raised $38 million. (12/10/24)

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