Daily AI Newsletter: Sam Altman’s officially back at OpenAI

In today’s email:

🧪 ChatGPT for chemistry: AI and robots join forces to build new materials
✍️ AI can turn simple sketches into animations!
🔎 Krea AI just introduced Upscale & Enhance.
🧰 10 new AI-powered tools and resources. Make sure to check the online version for the full list of tools.

Sam Altman’s officially back at OpenAI, and the board gains a Microsoft observer

Sam Altman has returned as CEO of OpenAI after a period of internal turmoil. The company's board attempted to remove him, leading to a significant upheaval. In response, OpenAI has now appointed a new board of directors. This board includes Bret Taylor (former co-CEO of Salesforce), Quora CEO D’Angelo (who was on the previous board), and economist Larry Summers. Additionally, Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor with a 49% stake, will have a non-voting observer on the board.

Mira Murati, who was briefly the interim CEO, will resume her role as CTO. The recent controversy began when the old board, including Altman, abruptly dismissed him, causing friction with Microsoft and other investors and prompting OpenAI employees to threaten resignation. The conflict was rooted in disagreements over OpenAI's direction and concerns about Altman's leadership style.

Altman's letter, shared internally and on the OpenAI blog, highlights future priorities such as advancing research, enhancing AI safety, and building a diverse board with improved governance. He emphasizes the importance of AI's benefits and OpenAI's commitment to its users, customers, and partners. The letter also addresses potential conflicts of interest, particularly concerning D’Angelo's involvement, and plans to manage these through full disclosure and board decision-making.

Stability AI Explores Sale as Investor Urges CEO to Resign

Stability AI, the British artificial intelligence startup behind the Stable Diffusion image generator, has explored selling the company as management faces increased pressure from investors over its financial position.

The London-based firm has presented itself as an acquisition target in recent weeks, and held early-stage conversations with multiple companies, according to several people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the discussions were private. A deal is not imminent and the company could cut the process short without selling, they said.

Per Bloomberg, Stability has held acquisition talks with Cohere and Jasper.

State of AI report by Retool

In 2023, AI—and specifically generative AI—has unequivocally gone mainstream. It seems like everyone has played around with large language models (LLMs)—and, with upwards of 100 million weekly active users, ChatGPT has practically become a household name.

Teachers, politicians, talk show hosts, the bus driver, and your grandparents may be using LLMs for going beyond Googling and oddball comedy bits—but those day-to-day use cases just scratch the surface of the possible. Digging deeper, folks working close to the tech are using a breadth of AI tools to transform products, reimagine businesses and deliver customer experiences in ways previously unimaginable... Or, at least, that’s the promise.

So what’s the real story? We surveyed over 1,500 tech people—software engineers, eng and business leaders, execs, product folks, designers, and more—in a variety of industries to find out. Read on to learn how they’re actually using and building with AI.

Krea AI just introduced Upscale & Enhance.

Krea AI has just launched an image enhancer tool, and it's really powerful. It's especially powerful if you need to upscale and enhance your AI-generated images.

After testing it multiple times with different images, one of the most important points to consider is the AI Strength value.

Don't set the AI strength value too high; always start somewhere between 0.5 and increase it slowly. A high value will result in an output that is very different from the input images.

Related: A thread on comparing the newly released AI enhancers