Top stories today:

1. OpenAI’s Q* breakthrough may have precipitated Altman’s firing
2. Inflection 2 announced, claims to be 2nd best LLM worldwide
3. GPT-4 beats Claude 2.1 on fact retrieval
4. X will return to showing headlines on links
5. Google Meet can now detect if someone raises their hand

0. Data and calendar

1. OpenAI’s Q* breakthrough may have precipitated Altman’s firing

Q* is seen by some as an improvement of this research published in May by OpenAI:

• Q* is a new AI model able to solve certain math problems without having seen them in the training data.

  • AGI-nearing advance, some believe.

  • Some employees sent a letter to the board warning them about Q*.

• Another potential explanation for Altman’s firing: OpenAI hired MIT professor Aleksander Madry around summertime to develop a responsible training policy. He reported to CTO Mira Murati, rather than Chief Scientist and previous board member Ilya Sutskever, which reportedly irritated Sutskever.

In other OpenAI news

• Thrive-led $86B tender offer likely to happen: group to buy $1B in secondaries from employees, possibly anticipating a larger primary investment into OpenAI.

• Potentially false rumor: Altman was fired from YC in 2019 for putting his own interests ahead of YC.

2. Inflection 2 announced, claims to be 2nd best LLM worldwide, just behind GPT-4

• To be integrated into Pi after a “series of alignment steps.”

• Trained on 5K NVIDIA H100 GPUs.

Our view: the top contenders to topple GPT-4 are Google Gemini, Claude 3, Inflection 3, and Grok 2

Prediction markets show 76% odds for Google Gemini, expected in Q1, to beat GPT-4. Of course, GPT-5 could come just a few weeks later:

4. GPT-4 can retrieve facts successfully up to 64K-token context length; Claude 2.1, only 19K