😺 Elon launches X

PLUS: behind the scenes of Google's underpaid contractors.

Welcome, humans.

Today we’re getting a tad political — tune in for some hot takes and controversial agendas… 👀

Here’s what’s going on in AI today:

Elon Musk launched X, his rival to OpenAI.
Big AI models are being trained by inexperienced contractors.
Shopify announced a startup sidekick for business owners.
Adobe Firefly has created over 1 billion images.

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Elon Musk Launches OpenAI Competitor, X.ai

Elon Musk is launching his OpenAI competitor, “X.”

Here’s what we know:

“X” is some sort of AI research company whose goal is “to understand the true nature of the universe.” Sounds like inspiration from a magic mushrooms trip.
The founding team is stacked with AI engineers/researchers from OpenAI, Google and other institutions.

Now here’s what we think we know:

If “X” is the anti-OpenAI, then we might see a more open-source and less restrictive approach to building AI.
That’s in contrast to ChatGPT, Bing Chat and newly launched Claude. People are noticing how tight-lipped these chatbots have become.
One advantage is X’s exclusive access to Twitter and Tesla’s massive corpus of text, image, and video training data.
One potential focus area for X: build AI that can solve math. From an X team member: “Solve math and understand the universe.”

Here’s our take: Never bet against Elon, but OpenAI and co. have a big headstart in the AI models game. We’ll get more deets on what X is bringing to the table in tomorrow’s Twitter Spaces.

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Meet The Contractors Powering OpenAI And Google AI 👷

“Gogle”, by Midjourney

AI models like ChatGPT improve through a system of human feedback. It’s called reinforcement learning: good actions get a thumbs-up and bad ones, a thumbs-down.

That’s why Google and OpenAI hire thousands of remote contractors to play referee, rating whether or not the AI says the “right” thing.

But there’s a problem…the race to build AI is so frantic it’s leaving these contractors confused and overworked.

Many contractors report being shoved into a game of rating outputs that they’re not prepared for, including topics around legalities and medication dosages.

To make matters murkier, they're told to flag any "false, deceiving, or misleading info" yet claim to lack reliable sources to distinguish fact from fiction.

Why it matters: Tech giants are racing to ship and refine AI models. We're just crossing our fingers that this sprint doesn't end up tripping over quality and accuracy.

Around the Horn 🦄

Shopify is announced a personal sidekick for entrepreneurs on its platform.
Google is rolling out a note-taking software dubbed NotebookLM.
Adobe Firefly has churned out over 1 billion images and now supports prompts in over 100 languages.
Wipro, an Indian outsourcing provider, is investing $1 billion to teach its staff how to use AI.
Google is facing its own class action lawsuit for scraping online data.