Headlines You Should Know

Prepare for More OpenAI Chaos

Life is moving so fast for Sam Altman, he needs AI to keep his resume updated with the ridiculous pace of OpenAI’s corporate upheaval. The company’s co-founder and chief executive officer was unceremoniously fired by the OpenAI board Friday because “he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board.” 

The move caused a firestorm. Microsoft (the biggest investor in OpenAI) CEO Satya Nadella stepped in to mediate a potential reunion between Altman and the board, with his own business interests on the line. Microsoft stock dipped more than 2% after hours Friday, following news of Altman’s firing. By Monday, Nadella had hired Altman to work at Microsoft and the stock hit an all-time high. Some 700 OpenAI employees vowed to quit, claiming jobs were waiting for them at Microsoft, too, unless the entire board resigns.  

For as much action as there was over the weekend, the story has been in relative limbo since. It’s hard to know what comes next for ChatGPT, but there are massive implications — some start-ups based their entire business model on OpenAI’s technology, creating chaos of their own. If there is a mass exodus at OpenAI, could ChatGPT still exist? Would Microsoft, which owns a 49% stake in OpenAI, be able to acquire the technology along with all those employees? If not, do we all have to start using Bard?!

Elsewhere …

•  
• LISTEN: Navigating AI in the World of Writing
• Amazon Hoping to Train Millions Through Free AI Courses
• Training for 1 Trillion-Parameter ‘ScienceGPT’ Model has Just Begun
• With All Eyes on OpenAI, Meta Drags its Responsible AI Team to the Recycle Bin

Tips and Tricks

 How to Keep a Consistent Voice

What’s happening: Communicators need a way to consistently replicate a voice, either for a brand or specific person, across pieces of content. In the early days of ChatGPT, there was a lot of copy and pasting, asking the AI chatbot  to define the author’s voice, then telling it to carry that definition through its outputs. You had to repeat this process at the start of each chat, and while it may have been quicker than writing a piece manually, it still took time. Things are easier now.

Why it matters: ChatGPT’s ability to ingest documents has reduced the process to merely a click. The advent of GPTs (check out last week’s edition for more on that) takes it a step further — by having those examples within the GPT’s instructions or knowledge documents, you don’t even have to prompt for voice.

Try it out: If you’re working on a piece of content that’s more of a one-off, just conduct a regular conversation with ChatGPT, uploading examples in a document and including something like, “Make your writing align with the voice, style, and tone of the examples attached” in your prompt. 

If you’re doing something more routine, like a series of press releases around the same topic or for the same brand, creating a GPT would be the way to go. Upload examples under the “Knowledge” section, and include the same instructions about referring to those documents when the GPT creates content.

Quote of the Week

“This underscores a big discussion happening: Are you going to build your technology and platforms and key features on third-party LLMs? As a builder on top of (OpenAI’s) products, I worry if there will be any other sudden decisions that could impact our models. Also, it’s really expensive.”

— Gaurav Oberoi, Founder of start-up company Lexion, to the New York Times on the chaos at OpenAI