After watching small drones reshape the battlefield in Ukraine, the US Army has announced plans to buy 1 million drones over the next two to three years, according to a report from Reuters.
The military threat of China’s dominance of the quadcopter-style drone industry is also driving the decision. But China’s control over much of the supply chain for drones, including rare earth magnets, sensors, and microcontrollers, will make it much harder for American drone manufacturers to catch up.
This week, OpenAI plans to permanently remove its 4o model from ChatGPT.
The model has developed an unusually devoted group of users. But it also has been criticized for being overly sycophantic and allegedly may have led to a series of dangerous outcomes for its users, including suicide, murder, and mental health crises.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI’s decision to shutter 4o stems from the fact that the company was not able to successfully mitigate these potentially dangerous outcomes, and wanted to move users to safer models. Thirteen lawsuits against OpenAI alleging harm from the use of ChatGPT have been consolidated into one case by a California judge, according to the report. At least some of them are tied to users of the 4o model.
The company says only 0.1% of ChatGPT users still choose to use the model, but with 800 million weekly users, that’s still a lot of people.
Fans of the 4o model are decrying the deprecation of the model, citing its unique ability to offer affirmation and support.
The decision to get rid of 4o illustrates the strange new world of moderation that AI companies must now figure out.
The Wall Street Journal reports that OpenAI’s decision to shutter 4o stems from the fact that the company was not able to successfully mitigate these potentially dangerous outcomes, and wanted to move users to safer models. Thirteen lawsuits against OpenAI alleging harm from the use of ChatGPT have been consolidated into one case by a California judge, according to the report. At least some of them are tied to users of the 4o model.
The company says only 0.1% of ChatGPT users still choose to use the model, but with 800 million weekly users, that’s still a lot of people.
Fans of the 4o model are decrying the deprecation of the model, citing its unique ability to offer affirmation and support.
The decision to get rid of 4o illustrates the strange new world of moderation that AI companies must now figure out.
Tesla’s recently reported move into solar manufacturing could add $25 billion to $50 billion in value to the company’s energy business, Morgan Stanley writes.
The bank currently values the energy business at $140 billion, so an increase of as much as $50 billion isn’t anything to sneeze at, though it’s also a drop in the bucket of Tesla’s gargantuan $1.3 trillion market cap, or the $1 trillion opportunity Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives thinks is packed into Tesla’s AI and autonomy efforts.
Reporting on Tesla’s solar ambitions knocked First Solar shares lower last week. But Morgan Stanley writes that Tesla is unlikely to compete directly with the country’s leading photovoltaic panel maker, instead pairing it with its fast-growing energy business and using much of that production internally. Rather than adding solar panels to an already glutted global market, Tesla could use them internally to avoid supply chain bottlenecks and meet its own growing power demands.
The bank expects Tesla to vertically integrate its solar capacity to meet data center demand, including for data centers in space. (As we’ve noted, the mission of Elon Musk’s SpaceX has been seeming very similar to Tesla’s these days.)
“We believe the decision to allocate capital to adding solar capacity may be justified by the value creation and growth opportunities that having a vertically integrated solar + energy storage business can yield,” the Morgan Stanley note reads.
Notably, Morgan Stanley estimates the solar panel endeavor will cost Tesla $30 billion to $70 billion — a sum that Tesla didn’t include as part of its doubled $20 billion-plus capex plan this year.
Just a day after Anthropic’s Super Bowl ad aired, making fun of the concept of ad-backed AI chatbots, OpenAI began testing ads in ChatGPT for its free and Go subscription tiers.
In a blog post, OpenAI reiterated that ads wouldn’t affect ChatGPT’s responses and would be “clearly labeled as sponsored and visually separated from the organic answer.”
“Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks,” the company wrote. “We’re starting with a test to learn, listen, and make sure we get the experience right.”
Advertising is one way the company, which is expected to go public late this year, could offset the massive cost of running its service.
The Information previously reported that OpenAI aiming for ad spending commitments of less than $1 million per advertiser during the testing phase — far cheaper than a Super Bowl prime-time spot like Anthropic’s.
“Our goal is for ads to support broader access to more powerful ChatGPT features while maintaining the trust people place in ChatGPT for important and personal tasks,” the company wrote. “We’re starting with a test to learn, listen, and make sure we get the experience right.”
Advertising is one way the company, which is expected to go public late this year, could offset the massive cost of running its service.
The Information previously reported that OpenAI aiming for ad spending commitments of less than $1 million per advertiser during the testing phase — far cheaper than a Super Bowl prime-time spot like Anthropic’s.
The rapid adoption of AI by businesses was fueled by the promise of huge productivity boosts that could supercharge workers. A new study has found that while it did indeed boost workers’ productivity, the use of generative AI at work also made work more intense and creep into workers’ downtime.
Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye followed about 200 workers at a US tech company for eight months. They found that AI did speed up work, allowing employees to take on more responsibilities. But after the novelty of their newfound superpowers wore off, workers reported “cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making.”
The researchers noted that to avoid AI-inspired burnout and turnover, organizations should adopt an “AI practice,” spelling out how the technology is expected to be used and what kinds of limits are in place.
Researchers Aruna Ranganathan and Xingqi Maggie Ye followed about 200 workers at a US tech company for eight months. They found that AI did speed up work, allowing employees to take on more responsibilities. But after the novelty of their newfound superpowers wore off, workers reported “cognitive fatigue, burnout, and weakened decision-making.”
The researchers noted that to avoid AI-inspired burnout and turnover, organizations should adopt an “AI practice,” spelling out how the technology is expected to be used and what kinds of limits are in place.
