One segment that caught my attention:

Apps removed from the App Store subject to government takedown demands: 1,462

By country or region:

• China mainland: 1,285
• South Korea: 103
• India: 30
• Russia 12
• Indonesia: 8
• Lithuania: 5
• Ukraine: 5
• Malaysia: 2
• Mexico: 2
• Philippines: 2
• Thailand: 2
• Türkiye: 2
• Hungary: 1
• Libya: 1
• Pakistan: 1
• Vietnam: 1

There are footnotes on the China and South Korea numbers. For China it says “There were 1,067 game apps removed for lack of a legally required GRN license.” That’s a 2020 law that requires a government license for any paid game. For South Korea, which one doesn’t think of as a repressive country, it says “There were 102 game apps removed for their inappropriate age rating”, which accounts for all but one of them.

A few other items:

• Average weekly app downloads: 787,999,950
• Average weekly app redownloads: 1,656,894,821

I long suspected users engage in frequent churn with certain apps installed on their phones, but this seemingly puts a number to it: redownloading previously installed apps is more than twice as popular as downloading new apps. But 788 million weekly app downloads is a big number.

• Average weekly automatic app updates: 52,623,848,130
• Average weekly manual app updates: 562,782,228

No surprise that automatic app updates dwarf manual updates, given that automatic updates have been the default setting for many years. These numbers indicate there are almost 100× more automatic updates than manual ones. (I update manually, typically each day, because I enjoy perusing the release notes, just in case there’s anything interesting in them. I’m glad Apple still offers manual updates as a setting.)

Sigal Samuel (tweet):

For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them.

Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike announced their departures from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, on Tuesday. They were the leaders of the company’s superalignment team — the team tasked with ensuring that AI stays aligned with the goals of its makers, rather than acting unpredictably and harming humanity.

[…]

Altman was fundraising with autocratic regimes like Saudi Arabia so he could spin up a new AI chip-making company, which would give him a huge supply of the coveted resources needed to build cutting-edge AI. That was alarming to safety-minded employees. If Altman truly cared about building and deploying AI in the safest way possible, why did he seem to be in a mad dash to accumulate as many chips as possible, which would only accelerate the technology?

[…]

For employees, all this led to a gradual “loss of belief that when OpenAI says it’s going to do something or says that it values something, that that is actually true,” a source with inside knowledge of the company told me.

I don’t think wanting access to chips is a bad sign, but it seems clear that the safety folks lost the power struggle within the company.

Greg Brockman and Sam Altman:

We’re really grateful to Jan for everything he’s done for OpenAI, and we know he’ll continue to contribute to the mission from outside. In light of the questions his departure has raised, we wanted to explain a bit about how we think about our overall strategy.

As many of the replies note, the words seem rather hollow and don’t really correspond with their actions.

Kelsey Piper:

But there was no stronger sign of OpenAI’s commitment to its mission than the prominent roles of people like Sutskever and Leike, technologists with a long history of commitment to safety and an apparently genuine willingness to ask OpenAI to change course if needed.

[…]

And it makes it clear that OpenAI’s concern with external oversight and transparency couldn’t have run all that deep. If you want external oversight and opportunities for the rest of the world to play a role in what you’re doing, making former employees sign extremely restrictive NDAs doesn’t exactly follow.

Altman claims that they didn’t actually mean to cancel the equity for employees who didn’t sign the exit NDA. It was just a mistake in the paperwork (via Ryan Jones, Hacker News).

Previously:

• Altman and Brockman Out at OpenAI
• OpenAI Is Today Unrecognizable

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, has temporarily paused the use of one of its new AI-generated voices after users pointed out its uncanny resemblance to Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson.

The voice in question, dubbed "Sky," was one of five new AI-powered voices launched last week as part of OpenAI's major upgrade to ChatGPT called GPT-4o. This new model allows users to interact with the chatbot using natural voice commands and receive spoken responses.

However, Sky's sultry tones immediately drew comparisons to Johansson's voice work as an AI assistant in the 2013 film Her. OpenAI acknowledged the likeness but insisted Sky's voice belongs to "a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice."

"We've heard questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT, especially Sky. We're working to pause the use of Sky until we can respond properly," OpenAI stated on X, formerly Twitter.

The controversy highlights concerns about AI models replicating real individuals' voices, faces or personal details without consent. While OpenAI claims it did not deliberately mimic Johansson, the resemblance raises ethical questions about the emerging AI voice technology.

In a blog post, OpenAI provided details on the extensive five-month process of partnering with casting directors, voice actors and the creative community to develop the AI voices for GPT-4o. Over 400 submissions were reviewed before selecting the final five performers, who each received "above top-of-market rates."

"We believe that AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity's distinctive voice," OpenAI stated, adding it cannot reveal the voice actors' names to protect their privacy.

As AI assistants become more humanlike, issues around data privacy, consent and potential exploitation of performers' likenesses will likely intensify.

OpenAI has paused Sky's use for now, but the company plans to introduce even more AI voice options for ChatGPT paid users in the future.

"We plan to give access to a new Voice Mode for GPT-4o(opens in a new window) in alpha to ChatGPT Plus users in the coming weeks".

Voice reading problem on Web and App version

Apart from this controversy, many users have reported that they were having issues with the voice features.

One plus user reported that even after switching multiple browsers he/she is facing the issue with the voice feature on the web, while another plus user reported that he is receiving the error message “Connection failed. Tap to retry” in the iOS app, even though his internet connection is working.

IBM is selling its QRadar product suite to Palo Alto Networks, for an undisclosed—but probably surprisingly small—sum.

I have a personal connection to this. In 2016, IBM bought Resilient Systems, the startup I was a part of. It became part if IBM’s cybersecurity offerings, mostly and weirdly subservient to QRadar.

That was what seemed to be the problem at IBM. QRadar was IBM’s first acquisition in the cybersecurity space, and it saw everything through the lens of that SIEM system. I left the company two years after the acquisition, and near as I could tell, it never managed to figure the space out.

So now it’s Palo Alto’s turn.