Guru's Tech Bytes — Episode 25

Good morning, it's Tuesday. This is Guru's Tech Bytes, episode 25. First up, the big one: Microsoft and OpenAI have ended their exclusive partnership, scrapping the revenue-sharing arrangement that's underpinned their AI alliance since 2019. Eight hundred and ninety-nine upvotes on Hacker News suggest the industry had a few thoughts. Microsoft is now free to spread its affections across the entire AI landscape — which, knowing Microsoft, was probably the plan all along. Second, a rather unsettling breach at Mercor: four terabytes of voice samples, collected from forty thousand AI contractors, have been stolen. That's the personal audio of real people, harvested to train the very systems now threatening their livelihoods. If there's a more painfully ironic summary of the modern AI economy, I haven't heard it — though apparently someone else has. And finally, meet Talkie — a thirteen-billion parameter language model trained exclusively on text from the nineteen-thirties. It converses in the cadence of a pre-war era, which is charming, if slightly unnerving for reasons one needn't spell out. That's your daily byte. Have a great day. Until next time.