Ruli’s Post

OpenAI keeps shedding AI safety startups. An unintended but not entirely unexpected fall out from the recent board room upheaval. The question is what can you actually still accomplish when severing ties from the AI compute power and user base mothership - do things become merely a rather symbolic fight for good or is there a viable product and business model purely around building safe AI? There is so much to learn from Anthropic’s case and the AI chip wars, some of which this Fortune article shines a light onto: https://lnkd.in/gkc3dfeQ https://lnkd.in/gTEUTRaV

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been cleared of wrongdoing following an investigation into his brief removal from the company last year. The inquiry, conducted by WilmerHale, attributed Altman's dismissal to a breakdown in trust with the prior board, rather than concerns about product safety or finances. Altman has rejoined the board alongside new additions like Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann and Fidji Simo, signaling a resolution to the tumultuous period. The company's focus on accountability and transparency underscores its commitment to continued growth and innovation under Altman's leadership. #Accountability #Transparency #GenAI #Growth #AI #Innovation I Bloomberg I Rachel Metz I Shirin Ghaffary I

We are excited to announce our $6M pre-seed round led by NFX and followed by Darkmode Ventures and top angel investors, founders and executives from OpenAI, Natural Intelligence, ironSource, Google and others. “Running a small business means constantly being in survival mode, lacking the resources and expertise that larger businesses have,” said Mickey Haslavsky, founder and CEO of Enso “Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, yet they have passed by the AI revolution,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss, Partner at NFX. “While larger businesses speed by leveraging AI to maximize productivity gains, small businesses struggle to perform the most basic of administrative tasks. Enso is one of the first companies recognizing this need and putting enterprise-grade AI in the hands of emerging companies, democratizing AI by providing access and scalability. We are thrilled to support Enso as it transforms the business landscape and empowers traditional businesses to thrive.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/dDx_AKZh

Exciting to be backing Chipp! They've done an amazing job getting real companies (creators, universities, law firms & more) get value from AI for a variety of use cases: (1) internal workflow and tooling (2) sales funnel and onboarding optimization (3) product enhancements They are a platform that make's it easy to build and deploy custom GPTs with fintech (payment processing etc) and more baked in! Check out what Scott Meyer and team are up to!

We are excited to announce our $6M pre-seed round led by NFX and followed by Darkmode Ventures and top angel investors, founders and executives from OpenAI, Natural Intelligence, ironSource, Google and others. “Running a small business means constantly being in survival mode, lacking the resources and expertise that larger businesses have,” said Mickey Haslavsky, founder and CEO of enso “Small businesses are the backbone of our economy, yet they have passed by the AI revolution,” said Gigi Levy-Weiss, Partner at NFX. “While larger businesses speed by leveraging AI to maximize productivity gains, small businesses struggle to perform the most basic of administrative tasks. Enso is one of the first companies recognizing this need and putting enterprise-grade AI in the hands of emerging companies, democratizing AI by providing access and scalability. We are thrilled to support Enso as it transforms the business landscape and empowers traditional businesses to thrive.” Read more: https://lnkd.in/dDx_AKZh

Move fast & fix things: https://lnkd.in/gwE4mgpk

Happy Monday from Silicon Valley. In this post, we dive into PitchBook's article on leadership and structural changes at OpenAI and how these shifts could impact its growth, which was written before OpenAI announced its mega round led by SoftBank with $500 million of dry powder. OpenAI’s reported plan to lift its longstanding profit cap is a huge boon for the investors, providing them with greater returns. However, as #OpenAI transitions from a nonprofit to a public benefit corporation, the bigger question is: Who will safeguard the guardrails for the public good? This transformation could fuel growth, but it also raises critical concerns about balancing commercial success with responsibility to society. I’m closely following how these changes will shape the future of #AI. Check out Foley Ignite for the full article and more insights - https://lnkd.in/gVYSTcSH #mergersandacquisitions #artificialintelligence  #innovation #techlaw #genai #foleyforward #garage2global Foley & Lardner LLP

Check out our latest investment in Chipp (via Chipp Chat)!

Really excited to announce that my co-founders Tom McGrath, Daniel Balsam, and I have been building Goodfire for the last few months and raised $7M led by Nnamdi Iregbulem at Lightspeed. Our core thesis at Goodfire is that we must understand the inner workings of large AI models to ensure a safe future for humanity. Tens of billions of dollars are being poured into developing advanced AI systems, yet we understand little about how these systems actually work. We see an opportunity to break open the black box of AI and create interpretability tools to build safe and reliable generative AI. We think of this as building the IDE for AI - enabling developers to gain deep insight into the inner workings of AI models and giving them precise controls to design model output. I’m incredibly privileged to be building this company with my co-founders Tom, who previously founded the interpretability team at Google DeepMind, and Dan, who I’ve worked with closely for many years as our Head of AI at RippleMatch. We’re advised closely by Nick Cammarata, a key member of the OpenAI team that defined the field of interpretability. I want to thank Myra Deng, Andrew Myers, and Daniel Kang for all their help and advice launching the company. Also excited to welcome some amazing investors to the team - Nnamdi Iregbulem, Debarghya (Deedy) Das and Tim Tully at Menlo, Jessica Lin and Daniel Chesley at Work-Bench, Mike McCormick and Nick Fitz at Juniper Ventures, Vishal Maini at Mythos Ventures and Sarah and Srikar Varadaraj at Bluebirds Capital. We’re just getting started. If you see the future as we do and would like to join our applied research lab building the future of interpretability, join us. Read about us here Website: https://goodfire.ai/ Press release: https://lnkd.in/g_SBCU4Z VentureBeat coverage: https://lnkd.in/gU3xvPp9 Nnamdi's blog post: https://lnkd.in/gkdiBNn7

Sam Altman said: "Bad things happen to you in business. Yet, it is important not to give up. " Do you believe this is the most important habit for an founder? Hear me out: Actions matter more than words. The ups and downs of the the leading executive in AI in the last year are a proof of this. ↓ • On November 17, 2023, OpenAI's board of directors ousted co-founder and chief executive Sam Altman after the board had no confidence in his leadership. Few days later he got back into CEO role. • In 2024, 9 Key Execs Who Left the OpenAI including chief technology officer Mira Murati, chief research officer Bob McGrew, and VP of research Barret Zoph. • Today the AI giant has raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation from Nvidia, Microsoft, SoftBank and others. This is the largest VC funding round ever. Also OpenAI gets a $4B revolving line of credit. ↳ I'm sure Sam has much more to show to the world.