OpenAI's board had a busy weekend, sacking CEO Sam Altman because "he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, hindering its ability to exercise its responsibilities". This lead President Greg Brockman and "three senior scientists" to resign in protest. Apparently the OpenAI board saw the recent Dev Day keynote and were pissed off that OpenAI is straying from its non-profit mission (I forgot OpenAI is a non-profit!) of "ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity" - essentially a power struggle between the academics and the startup bros. This left OpenAI's major partner and compute cow Microsoft "blindsided" and Satya Nadella so "furious" that they're agitating to sack the OpenAI board and bring Sam Altman back. Get the popcorn out folks.
Also in unceremonious exits, Kelly Bayer Rosmarin has resigned as CEO of Optus. She said in a statement that "having now had time for some personal reflection, I have come to the decision that my resignation is in the best interest of Optus moving forward". Kinda expected considering the absolute shitshow that was the "cyber attack" a few months ago that will probably see the OAIC hand out some punishments and/or legal proceedings and the recent network outage. I missed it on Friday, but Optus' managing director of networks Lambo Kanagaratnam admitted in the Senate that "we didn't have a plan in place for that specific scale of outage". Come on man, you're the 2nd biggest telco in the country and you didn't have a plan for a a total network outage? Lambo should follow Kelly out the door.
eSafety has released draft Industry Standards that applies to basically every website and app in Australia and any service where people can chat to each other. The headline demand from eSafety is mandatory, proactive and automated monitoring of these services for kiddie porn or terrorist content where "technically feasible" (so E2EE is safe for now), and if not feasible, "take appropriate alternative action". The Commissioner used WhatsApp as an example, who she claims can "pick up on a range of behavioural signals that they've developed over time, and they can scan non-encrypted parts of the services, including profile and group chat names, and things like cheese pizza emojis, which is known to stand for child pornography" - err, the US Qanon nutjob conspiracy theory cheese pizza??? I know the commissioner is a crank, but this is next level naive. Fact sheets explaining the Industry Standards are on eSafety's website.
Expedition 70 Flight Engineer Oleg Kononenko from Roscosmos is pictured during a spacewalk to inspect a backup radiator, deploy a nanosatellite, and install communications hardware on the International Space Station's Nauka science module. (NASA Johnson / Flickr)
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