Welcome back to The Prompt,
Today, former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced her new venture: Thinking Machine Labs, a public benefit corporation that aims to build accessible and broadly capable artificial intelligence systems. After leaving AI juggernaut OpenAI last September, Murati has brought together a team of engineers and researchers who have worked at buzzy startups like Character AI, Mistral and unsurprisingly, OpenAI. Additionally, Thinking Machine Labs said it will publish its technical blog posts, code and papers and collaborate with the broader community, indicating it plans to open source its work.
Now let’s get into the headlines.
BIG PLAYS
The cluttered world of AI reasoning models just got its newest addition. On Monday Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI launched a new AI model called Grok-3 that can process and answer complex questions across domains like science and math. In a livestream on X, Musk said the company’s mission is to “understand the universe…to figure out what’s going on, where are the aliens and what’s the meaning of life.”
The billionaire claims the model is built using 10 times more compute than Grok 2, likely from its “gigafactory of compute” in Memphis, and that it has been trained on public data from sources including social media platform X and legal documents. xAI also rolled out an AI-powered search engine called DeepSearch. OpenAI cofounder and former Tesla executive Andrej Karpathy, who tested the model, says Grok-3’s capabilities are largely on par with OpenAI’s best models but gets some questions wrong. Others have noted the model is lacking in its coding abilities compared to others. Grok-3 has yet not been independently evaluated and is only available to paying users.
ETHICS + LAW
Condé Nast, Vox, The Atlantic and a group of publishers have sued $5.5 billion-valued AI company Cohere for copyright and trademark violations. (Forbes is part of the group suing Cohere.) The lawsuit alleges that the Canadian AI startup scraped 4,000 copyrighted articles from the internet and used them to train its family of large language models called Command, which reproduced sections or entire works (at times word for word), allowing users to get information without visiting the publishers’ websites. It’s not the first time an AI company has faced publishers’ scrutiny. Last year, AI search engine Perplexity came under fire for republishing copyright works from multiple publications including Forbes. (In response, Forbes sent a cease and desist letter to Perplexity, accusing it of copyright infringement.)
AI DEALS OF THE WEEK
Humanoid robotics company Figure AI is in talks to raise $1.5 billion in venture capital at an eye-popping $39.5 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. The news comes as the company is reportedly in talks with Meta to make robots for household chores.
AI legal company Luminance, which helps customers like AMD and National Grid generate, negotiate and analyze contracts, has raised $75 million in series C funding.
Chip startup Encharge AI has raised $100 million in a series B funding led by Tiger Global. CEO Naveen Verma started the company out of a lab in Princeton, where he worked on designing architecture for hardware that would help run large language models more compute and energy efficiently. Verma says the chips allow AI models to run locally on devices such as personal computers.
DEEP DIVE
Elon Musk’s surprise bid for the nonprofit controlling artificial intelligence behemoth OpenAI did exactly what he wanted it to. Announced as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and other business and world leaders convened in Paris for a global AI summit, the unsolicited $97.4 billion offer for the nonprofit refocused the world’s attention on Musk and his efforts to block OpenAI’s transition to a for-profit company.
An irked Altman quickly dismissed Musk’s offer and sources close to OpenAI say it’s hard to imagine it going anywhere. But even if that’s the case, Musk has likely caused a headache for Altman, who is orchestrating the company’s transition to a for-profit venture. He’s attempted to forcefully raise the nonprofit price – which would make it harder for OpenAI to justify paying anything less.
Musk’s bid is the first hard number that values the nonprofit that controls OpenAI; that entity has to be bought out and become a minority shareholder for OpenAI to successfully transition to a for-profit company. Previously, The Information had reported the nonprofit was worth around $40 billion, citing a 25% stake and the company’s valuation at time. But with his $97.4 billion bid, Musk has backed Altman into a corner; now, as a board member, Altman faces pressure to sell the nonprofit for at least what Musk is asking. If he were to sell for anything less, it’d be a bad look, making it seem like he’s lowballing his own company to reduce share dilution.
“The important part here is that if [the board] doesn’t take it, which they almost certainly won’t, then they’ve made clear that they think the assets Musk is trying to buy are worth more than $97 billion,” a person familiar with the company told Forbes. “So if the for-profit tries to buy them later, the nonprofit will have to get more than that — otherwise the board is likely in breach of their fiduciary duties.”
Read the full story on Forbes.
MODEL BEHAVIOR
Generative AI is making it easier for fraudsters to carry out romance scams at scale, Wired reported. AI chatbots are being used to generate hundreds of deceptive scripts and generate fully fake profiles on dating apps. AI has already made a foray into the dating world. Last year, we wrote about a man who programmed ChatGPT to reply to his matches on Tinder and set up dates for him.
