The drama and back-and-forth negotiations continue to swirl around OpenAI and founder and former CEO Sam Altman. According to theverge.com, the latest is that Altman wants to return to OpenAI instead of going to Microsoft. Apparently, negotiations are still in process with the OpenAI board. New interim CEO Emmet Shear is involved…which has to be pretty strange. We’ll try to update again tomorrow as things proceed.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Nvidia have all offered to hire OpenAI employees, as most of those have threatened to walk out unless Sam Altman is brought back. Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and Salesforce founder and CEO Marc Benioff have offered to match the compensation of any OpenAI employees looking to jump ship while team leaders at both Meta’s FAIR and Nvidia have solicited resumes and offered to place former OpenAI employees in their divisions. My best guess? At some point, if things don’t work out with Altman and the OpenAI board, Microsoft may try to swoop in and just buy the startup. They already have invested or pledged some $15 billion so they are pretty deep into OpenAI already. 

Large Language Models — such as those used in chatbots — have an alarming tendency to hallucinate. That is, to generate false content that they present as accurate. These AI hallucinations pose, among other risks, a direct threat to science and scientific truth, researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute warn. Thenextweb.com says the Institute warns that “LLMs are designed to produce helpful and convincing responses without any overriding guarantees regarding their accuracy or alignment with fact.” The researchers note that when it comes to science and education, information accuracy is of vital importance. That also applies to math and accounting…accuracy matters!

Samsung’s next Unpacked event will be January 17th…a couple weeks earlier than usual. Androidpolice.com reports that the company has confirmed the date to the Korean press. Samsung says they aim to create the “smartest AI phones ever” with the Galaxy S24 series, incorporating features like AI Live Translate Call and competing with Google’s Pixel 8 in AI capabilities. It is expected that Samsung will start taking preorders for the S24 line right after the event. 

I’m Clark Reid and you’re ‘Technified’ for now.