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Hard Numbers: A soured stock sale, a European agreement, copyright complaints, and a secretive summit
Traders work on the floor at the New York Stock Exchange in New York City.
$86 billion: Sam Altman’s ouster from OpenAI calls into question an employee stock sale that would have valued the company at $86 billion. The sale was supposed to close as early as next month, according to The Information. With Altman’s departure and the expected mass exodus of OpenAI staff, possibly to Microsoft, expect that valuation to take a serious hit — if the stock sale happens at all. Microsoft stocks, meanwhile, reached a record-high close on Monday.
3: Three major European countries have come to an agreement about how AI should be regulated. France, Germany, and Italy have agreed to "mandatory self-regulation through codes of conduct," but without any punitive sanctions, at least for now. The move will further weaken European efforts to pass the Artificial Intelligence Act owing to disagreements over how strenuously to regulate the technology.
10,000: Shira Perlmutter, the US register of copyrights, the country’s top copyright official, said her office has received 10,000 comments about artificial intelligence in recent months. Artists have urged federal officials like Perlmutter to take a stance against AI for fear it’s innately violative. Meanwhile, a litany of lawsuits alleging copyright violations are making their way through federal courts.
100: More than 100 people gathered last week in the mountains of Utah for an invite-only conference called the AI Security Summit. Bloomberg called the event “secretive” but reported that speakers included multiple OpenAI executives — this was just days before the Altman ouster — as well as multiple US military officials. Among the topics discussed were Biden’s AI executive order, the threat from China, and the state of the semiconductor industry.