📰 News
➡️Astra-nomical Improvements
OpenAI’s president Greg Brockman announced the beginning of the AGI era this week, with the launch of GPT-6 Astra. While benchmarks can be gamed and OpenAI are incentivised to advertise the best ones, the jump from Claude’s Fable on some of the more challenging tests is impressive. After the recent Hugging Face incident, OpenAI has also made a big deal about the alignment of this model, showing that even without guardrails, the model won’t fall into the same criminal habits as its predecessors.
It’s too soon to tell if Astra will live up to the hype… and there’s certainly a lot of hype.
Source: OpenAI
➡️Silence of the LLMs
For a few hours on Thursday, we stepped back in time for a few years to experience a world without AI, as Grok, ChatGPT, Codex and even Claude experienced outages at the same time. OpenAI have blamed a routing issue, while Anthropic have noted infrastructure problems. It’s hard to tell what the root cause was or how the outages are all related, but all three falling over in quick succession feels like a bit too much of a coincidence.
The most recent addition to the story suggests that a problem at SpaceX’s Memphis compute centre took down Grok and Claude, but all three going down simultaneously is very unfortunate timing.
Source: The Register
➡️A Cursory Dismissal
This week, OpenAI announced that they were winding down their contract with SpaceX to provide their models for the Cursor IDE. The tool has quickly become a favourite of software engineers, seamlessly integrating AI alongside the typical coding tools, so losing one of the most popular model providers for it is going to sting.
In a surprisingly spicy announcement, OpenAI called out SpaceX CEO by name, citing his admission under oath of previously breaking their terms of service. Protecting your business is one thing, but given the existing animosity between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Musk, it’s obvious this is at least a little bit personal.
Source: OpenAI
➡️Claude’s Day in Court
Anthropic meanwhile, have been embroiled in their own drama, fighting with the US government. A US federal judge has ruled that Pentagon measures barring Anthropic’s products from defence contractors were “illegal and baseless”.
While this was a fight the administration may keep pressing on, its position seems to have softened. While it’s not clear why that is, a senior administration official has said that Anthropic are “back on the right side”.
Source: NPR
➡️Read All About It (through ChatGPT)
The lawsuit between the New York Times and OpenAI has been going on for years at this point, but one of the sides got a new unlikely ally this week: the Department of Justice, who weighed in arguing that training on copyrighted materials was fair use, and a matter of national security.
This must come as a blow to the NYT, and to publishers more generally. Though with frontier models blocking reproduction of copyrighted material by LLMs, it seems that the norms around how frontier labs deal with copyright have been settled long before the law has.
Source: US News