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Welcome back to The Prompt,
As Hurricane Helene wreaks havoc in North Carolina and Florida, AI-generated images of victims and first responders are spreading on platforms like Instagram, Facebook and X, Forbes reported. An AI-generated image of a young girl stranded in flood waters holding a drenched puppy in her hand has more than a million views on X, Kevin Guo, CEO of content moderation platform Hive confirmed with me. The image is being used to spread misinformation about the federal government’s response to the disaster.
Other AI-generated images of Hurricane Helene’s aftermath, such as a man wading through water while holding a dog, law enforcement officials providing relief and Donald Trump in a life jacket trawling through muddy water, are also circulating on social media. Experts say such fake images could hurt humanitarian efforts and make it difficult for victims to find support and trustworthy information.
Now let’s get into the headlines.
ETHICS + LAW
AI unicorn Character AI briefly hosted a chatbot with the likeness of a teenage girl who was brutally murdered 18 years ago, Forbes reported. The girl’s father, Drew Crecente, got a Google Alert on Wednesday morning that someone had used his daughter’s yearbook photo and her name to create the bot. “It shocks the conscience, and it’s unacceptable behavior,” he said. The company removed the chatbot from its platform for violating its impersonation policies.
This comes after the once-buzzy startup’s CEO Noam Shazeer was hired by Google in a massive $2.7 billion deal and its interim leader announced that it plans to stop training cutting edge AI models and instead focus on its consumer product.
PEAK PERFORMANCE
Two computer scientists, Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, were awarded the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for inventing techniques that allow computers to understand information in a way similar to the human brain — teaching systems to ingest vast amounts of data and identify patterns. Hilton, known as one of the godfathers of AI, and Hopfield used concepts from physics to train artificial neural networks, laying a foundation for the development of machine learning systems like ChatGPT.
AI DEAL OF THE WEEK
Last week, OpenAI closed a $6.6 billion funding round at $157 billion valuation — the largest venture capital funding round of all time. Thrive Capital led the round with participation from giants like Microsoft, SoftBank and Nvidia among others, according to The Wall Street Journal. With 250 million people using its star product, ChatGPT, the AI giant plans to use the fresh funding to increase its compute capacity and launch more products.
Also notable: Braintrust, which offers software that evaluates how an AI product performs, has raised $36 million at a $150 million valuation, Forbes reported. Early adopters of AI like Notion and Figma use Braintrust to determine how well its AI integrations are responding to prompts.
DEEP DIVE
On a warm night in San Francisco earlier this week, Elon Musk stood on top of a small round coffee table, bathed in purple light. Flocks of AI engineers and researchers gathered around him, some sitting on a nearby stairwell, as the billionaire pitched them on joining his fledgling AI company, xAI.
At the event, a recruitment party for prospective employees, Musk’s main selling point was speed — touting the company’s pace in developing products, and creating AI tools in a fast and nimble environment, comparing xAI to an SR-71 jet. “No SR-71 Blackbird was ever shot down and it only had 1 strategy: to accelerate,” Musk said, according to one attendee.
The location was apt: The Pioneer Building in the city’s Mission district, a 122-year-old former truck factory, and most recently, headquarters of OpenAI, the juggernaut maker of ChatGPT led by cofounder Sam Altman. xAI had just moved into the building, Musk said, attendees told Forbes.
Musk has not been shy about his beef with OpenAI. He cofounded the company with Altman and others in 2015, before leaving three years later after an alleged internal power struggle. Since then, Musk has sued the company twice, accusing the company of abandoning its mission to build artificial intelligence to benefit humanity. (His latest suit was in August, after withdrawing a similar one in June.)
“He really wants to be the antithesis to OpenAI,” one attendee, Marvin von Hagen, told Forbes when asked about main takeaways from the evening. “They really want to go on and say, ‘Okay, we are the good guys now.’”
Musk’s remarks — as well as the office location — illustrate the looming role OpenAI plays for xAI. Musk held the event on the same day as OpenAI’s annual Dev Day, which some have speculated to be more than a coincidence. At the event, Musk joked about building “BasedGPT.” xAI cleared out OpenAI’s furniture from the office the day before the event, but at least one remnant still remains: A printed-out photo cutout of OpenAI president Greg Brockman is hanging on the ceiling of one of the rooms, two attendees said. (Brockman is currently on leave from OpenAI until the end of the year.) Von Hagen estimated that he saw about 10 current OpenAI employees in attendance.
Read the full story on Forbes.
WEEKLY DEMO
ChatGPT and other chatbots in its class are prone to regurgitate certain constructions of phrases in its responses. “Today’s fast paced world” and “play a significant role in shaping” are among the top 50 overused words by large language models, according to an analysis by AI content detection platform, GPTZero, Forbes reported. AI-generated text is particularly difficult to catch and such repetitive phrases are one way of spotting machine-written materials, as I reported with my colleague Alex Levine at the start of this year.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
Would you want a chatbot to be your wingman? Dating app Grindr bets you will. The app, with a user base of mostly gay and bisexual men, is testing an AI chatbot that will screen prospects to recommend dating partners, set up dates and keep a track of your conversations, the Wall Street Journal reported. On platforms like Tinder, some have already used chatbots to date for them, Forbes reported back in February. In one instance, a person built an auto-swiper and later used ChatGPT to chat with several women, one of whom he eventually married.
