Senior AI Reporter
Kylie Robison is a Senior AI Reporter for The Verge, working closely with The Verge’s policy and tech teams. She joined The Verge from Fortune, where she extensively covered the inner-workings of Elon Musk’s X with scoops on its plans to begin charging new users $1 a year to access key features, its plans to remove headlines from news articles, a chaotic internal all-hands after the platform sued Media Matters, and more. She authored the magazine’s cover story on OpenAI and has also profiled buzzy AI startups like Runway. She lives in San Francisco with her cat, who regularly appears in the background of her meetings. She spends her free time snowboarding, traveling, and playing games on her Nintendo Switch.
You can reach her on Signal: @kylie.01
Ethics statement, May 2024: Kylie's parent is employed by GitHub. She therefore does not currently report or edit stories about GitHub products or GitHub as a company.
The startup has appointed Zico Kolter, a professor and the director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, to its board of directors. Kolter will also join the Board’s Safety and Security Committee alongside a group of other board members and CEO Sam Altman.
Kolter has a background in developing safety methods for large language models and formerly worked as the Chief Data Scientist at C3.ai.
Humane’s daily returns are outpacing sales
The company is scrambling to stabilize as it hits $1 million in total returns against $9 million in sales.
In an all-hands at X, CEO Linda Yaccarino attempted to rally the troops after filing a lawsuit against a coalition of major advertisers, claiming they had coordinated an “illegal boycott” and cost the company billions of dollars.
Yaccarino urged employees to “review the evidence,” a source at X told me. She also hyped up X payments and shopping on the platform, but didn’t announce a launch date, and emphasized X’s “pivot to video.”
Mark Kalman, X’s engineering lead of media, and his second-in-command, Melissa Merencillo, resigned today. They announced their departures in a company Slack channel on the day stocks vest at X; Merencillo told The Verge that the timing had no bearing on their decision.
This is a big loss for X, a source tells me. Kalman is the main source of knowledge for all things X media infrastructure, and more important than that, he’s good at “handling” Elon Musk.
Update: added comment from Merencillo.
I was once told that the only reason people are wowed by AI products like ChatGPT is because it mimics us, and we’re obsessed with ourselves. I think about that a lot, especially as I watched this video of ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode catching its non-existent breath as it counts quickly to 50. So strange.
Sam Altman announced that OpenAI is collaborating with the US AI Safety Institute for early access to their next foundation model (but no release date was specified.)
He also emphasized OpenAI’s commitment to dedicating 20% of computing resources to safety, a promise originally made to the now-defunct Superalignment team.
Plus, he noted that OpenAI has removed non-disparagement clauses for employees and provisions allowing the cancellation of vested equity.
If you still use X, then you were likely opted-in to have your posts used as training data for the xAI chatbot Grok, Elon Musk’s AI company.
This may violate EU GDPR rules, which require companies to obtain consent before using personal data. The EU privacy watchdog told The Financial Times they were “surprised” and are “seeking clarity” on the issue.
[Financial Times]