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Sam Altman says Elon Musk’s mind games were damaging OpenAI

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Sam Altman says Elon Musk’s mind games were damaging OpenAI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says Elon Musk did “huge damage” to the culture of the AI startup. During testimony as part of Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI, Altman said Musk required OpenAI president Greg Brockman and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever to rank researchers by their accomplishments and “take a chainsaw through a bunch.”

Altman conceded that this was the management style the Tesla CEO was known for, but that it was incompatible with his startup. “I don’t think Mr. Musk understood how to run a good research lab,” Altman testified when his lawyer, William Savitt, asked about the impact of Musk’s departure from OpenAI on morale. “For a research lab where people need, sort of, psychological safety and long periods of time to pursue an idea, this idea that you constantly have to show your results, and if they’re not good enough on a short period, you’re going to get fired. That really didn’t work for the kind of research we went on to successfully do.”

Altman added that Musk’s departure “was a morale boost in some ways,” as staff members realized they didn’t have to “work this way anymore.” Musk’s lawsuit claims OpenAI abandoned its original mission of benefitting humanity, and that Altman and Brockman tricked him into providing funding for the startup.

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Hoto’s 25-bit electric screwdriver is 40 percent off during Prime Day

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Hoto’s 25-bit electric screwdriver is 40 percent off during Prime Day

You knew there’d be a Hoto deal, right? Whether you’re moving into a new apartment or tackling a growing list of small repairs around the house, a good electric screwdriver can save you time and effort. Hoto’s 3.6V Electric Screwdriver Kit Pro is one we love to recommend, especially because it’s on sale for $28.49 ($21.50 off) at Amazon and Walmart during Prime Day, which is just $5 shy of its all-time low price.

Unlike a big power drill, the Hoto is small and lightweight enough to keep in a drawer or car trunk, yet it’s powerful enough to tackle a number of common household tasks. The kit includes 25 interchangeable steel bits along with an extension bar, making it well suited to everything from assembling furniture to making small appliance repairs, or working on scooters and bikes.

The Hoto offers three torque settings, allowing you to apply less force when working with delicate electronics and more when putting together furniture. The rechargeable 1,500mAh battery charges via USB-C and can handle dozens of small projects on a single charge. As a convenience, there’s a built-in LED light that makes it easier to see what you’re doing, which is especially handy when working behind a TV stand or under a desk.

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Nvidia says its AI data center design runs hotter to use a lot less water

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Nvidia says its AI data center design runs hotter to use a lot less water

Public pushback against data centers has emphasized their water and energy consumption, and now Nvidia is highlighting its claim that the Rubin generation reference design for a fully liquid-cooled data center has “eliminated massive amounts of power usage and pretty much all water usage.” Still, it doesn’t address all of the concerns around AI data centers, including during their construction, and for the power generation requirements of the massive facilities. Also, as Gizmodo points out, Nvidia’s blog post doesn’t mention the cost of building this style of data center vs. one using less efficient air cooling, but claims that “every cloud provider and data center operator building for [Rubin] is making the transition.”

The efficiency gains are partly due to running AI servers hotter, as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Celsius). In a recent report, Amazon similarly touted higher heat tolerances as part of making its mostly air-cooled data centers more efficient.

With Nvidia’s system, “heat is captured directly at the chip and transported through liquid loops operating at much higher temperatures, allowing outdoor dry coolers to reject heat efficiently for much of the year,” with much more flexibility when it comes to the ambient air temperature.

According to Nvidia’s head of sustainability, Josh Parker, the reference design takes water use “from roughly 2.6 million gallons per megawatt per year for conventional cooling-tower-based systems to near zero — up to a 100 percent reduction.”

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Google invests in A24 to build AI movie tools

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Google invests in A24 to build AI movie tools

Google’s DeepMind AI lab is teaming up with A24 to develop new movie production technologies that aim to help future filmmakers “expand their storytelling possibilities.” As part of this new research and development collaboration, The Wall Street Journal reports that Google is investing “around $75 million” into A24, marking the first time the search giant has taken a stake in a film studio.

“The collaboration pairs a world-leading research lab with the industry’s most filmmaker-forward studio to help artists develop new workflows and techniques,” Google said in its announcement blog. “This ensures the tools of the future are shaped by the creators who use them.”

The partnership is expected to span across “multiple projects over time” according to Google, though the announcement doesn’t mention any specific movies that Google will be involved with. WSJ reports that Google and A24 are aiming to create new tools for movie production and distribution, something that Google alluded to in its own announcement, saying the “initial focus is on bridging the gap between cutting-edge technology and next generation entertainment.”

The multiyear deal is non-exclusive, according to WSJ, and doesn’t allow Google to access A24’s film and television library data. Still, the partnership is likely to raise some eyebrows in the film industry, given that Google’s AI models are trained on publicly available internet data, and how ferociously other movie studios like Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros have fought AI companies for alleged copyright violations.

WSJ also reports that Google and A24 are hoping to include the movie studio’s existing roster of artists in the deal, such as YouTube creator and Backrooms director, Kane Parsons. In an interview with The Australian earlier this month, Parsons said that “generative AI feels less like innovation than a symptom of a broader cultural and economic rot,” and that he gets “no enjoyment” out of using the technology on any project.

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According to Scott Belsky — an A24 partner who was previously Adobe’s chief strategy officer — the tools that Google and A24 are developing “won’t look anything like the prompted generation type of AI that people feel uncomfortable with.” In his statement to WSJ, Belsky said “there are better uses that preserve creative control and support risk-taking.”

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