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Two key OpenAI personnel are leaving the company, while another one is taking a months-long leave of absence. As reported by The Information, OpenAI president Greg Brockman is taking a sabbatical, while his fellow co-founder John Schulman is bidding the company farewell and joining its rival Anthropic. Peter Deng, its VP for consumer product who joined last year, is leaving OpenAI, as well. Deng used to lead product developments at Meta and Uber.

In a post on X/Twitter, Brockman said his leave of absence will last through end of year and that it’s his “first time to relax” since the founding of OpenAI nine years ago. He also reportedly assured staff members that he’s coming back after his vacation. Brockman temporarily left OpenAI last year when the company’s board ousted its CEO, Sam Altman. They were both reinstated just a few days later, whereas the board was disbanded and replaced.

John Schulman also posted the note he sent to OpenAI staff on X, where he said that his departure stems from his “desire to deepen [his] focus on AI alignment” and to “return to hands-on technical work.” He clarified that he wasn’t leaving OpenAI due to lack of support for alignment research and that the company’s executives have apparently been “very committed to investing in this area.” At OpenAI, Schulman helped lead the post-training team that refined its large language models. After the company disbanded the “Superalignment” team that was in charge of steering powerful AI models that could pose a threat to humanity in the future, OpenAI said Schulman would be in charge of any future safety efforts. 

These departures follow several major previous changes in OpenAI’s rank of leaders. Before the Superalignment team was disbanded, Jan Leike, one of its heads, wrote on X that “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products” within the company over the past years. Company co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever also left in May. He was involved in Altman’s dismissal as a board member, though he later said that he regretted his participation in the board’s actions. While he remained Chief Scientist after the event, he reportedly never truly returned to his duties. The Information also notes that OpenAI recently hired its first CFO and chief product officer, which may have had an effect on Deng’s role within the company. 

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/two-more-openai-leaders-are-leaving-the-company-110012003.html?src=rss 

In the latest example of a troubling industry pattern, NVIDIA appears to have scraped troves of copyrighted content for AI training. On Monday, 404 Media’s Samantha Cole reported that the $2.4 trillion company asked workers to download videos from YouTube, Netflix and other datasets to develop commercial AI projects. The graphics card maker is among the tech companies appearing to have adopted a “move fast and break things” ethos as they race to establish dominance in this feverish, too-often-shameful AI gold rush.

The training was reportedly to develop models for products like its Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems and “digital human” efforts.

NVIDIA defended its practice in an email to Engadget. A company spokesperson said its research is “in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of copyright law” while claiming IP laws protect specific expressions “but not facts, ideas, data, or information.” The company equated the practice to a person’s right to “learn facts, ideas, data, or information from another source and use it to make their own expression.” Human, computer… what’s the difference?

YouTube doesn’t appear to agree. Spokesperson Jack Malon pointed us to a Bloomberg story from April, quoting CEO Neal Mohan saying using YouTube to train AI models would be a “clear violation” of its terms. “Our previous comment still stands,” the YouTube policy communications manager wrote to Engadget.

That quote from Mohan in April was in response to reports that OpenAI trained its Sora text-to-video generator on YouTube videos without permission. Last month, a report showed that the startup Runway AI followed suit.

NVIDIA employees who raised ethical and legal concerns about the practice were reportedly told by their managers that it had already been green-lit by the company’s highest levels. “This is an executive decision,” Ming-Yu Liu, vice president of research at NVIDIA, replied. “We have an umbrella approval for all of the data.” Others at the company allegedly described its scraping as an “open legal issue” they’d tackle down the road.

It all sounds similar to Facebook’s (Meta’s) old “move fast and break things” motto, which has succeeded admirably at breaking quite a few things. That included the privacy of millions of people.

In addition to the YouTube and Netflix videos, NVIDIA reportedly instructed workers to train on movie trailer database MovieNet, internal libraries of video game footage and Github video datasets WebVid (now taken down after a cease-and-desist) and InternVid-10M. The latter is a dataset containing 10 million YouTube video IDs.

Some of the data NVIDIA allegedly trained on was only marked as eligible for academic (or otherwise non-commercial) use. HD-VG-130M, a library of 130 million YouTube videos, includes a usage license specifying that it’s only meant for academic research. NVIDIA reportedly brushed aside concerns about academic-only terms, insisting their batches were fair game for its commercial AI products.

To evade detection from YouTube, NVIDIA reportedly downloaded content using virtual machines (VMs) with rotating IP addresses to avoid bans. In response to a worker’s suggestion to use a third-party IP address-rotating tool, another NVIDIA employee reportedly wrote, “We are on [Amazon Web Services](#) and restarting a [virtual machine](#) instance gives a new public IP[.](#) So, that’s not a problem so far.”

404 Media’s full report on NVIDIA’s practices is worth a read.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/nvidias-ai-team-reportedly-scraped-youtube-netflix-videos-without-permission-204942022.html?src=rss 

X will soon close its longtime San Francisco office and move employees to offices elsewhere in the Bay Area, according to an email from CEO Linda Yaccarino reported by The New York Times. Yaccarino’s note to employees comes several weeks after Elon Musk threatened to move X’s headquarters out of California and into Austin, Texas.

Yaccarino’s note, however, doesn’t seem to mention Texas. According to The New York Times, she told employees the closure will happen over the “next few weeks” and that employees will work out of “a shared engineering space in Palo Alto” that’s also used by xAI, as well as other “locations in San Jose.”

Twitter, and now X, has had a rocky relationship with its home base since Musk’s takeover of the company. Musk banned employees from working remotely shortly after taking over the company in 2022, and ordered many Twitter workers back to the office in the mid-Market neighborhood of San Francisco.

He later ran afoul of the city’s Department of Building Inspection for installing a giant flashing X on top of the building, and for reportedly converting office space into hotel rooms for employees to sleep in. The company’s landlord had also sued X over unpaid rent, The San Francisco Chronicle reported earlier this year. The lawsuit was later dismissed.

Despite Musk’s frequent complaints about San Francisco and its elected leaders, he had previously vowed to keep the company’s headquarters in the city. “Many have offered rich incentives for X (fka Twitter) to move its HQ out of San Francisco,” Musk tweeted last year.

“Moreover, the city is in a doom spiral with one company after another left or leaving. Therefore, they expect X will move too. We will not. You only know who your real friends are when the chips are down. San Francisco, beautiful San Francisco, though others forsake you, we will always be your friend.”

But, even before Musk’s recent posts about moving to Austin, there were other signs X may be getting ready to leave after all. The San Francisco Chronicle reported in July that X’s landlord was looking to sublease much of the company’s 800,000 square-foot headquarters.

X didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/social-media/x-is-reportedly-closing-its-san-francisco-office-203650428.html?src=rss