October

3 events

Editors' summary

Talk of more Microsoft money for OpenAI

On 20 October, The Information and the Wall Street Journal reported that talks with Microsoft over further investment in OpenAI had advanced. A share sale the previous year had reportedly valued OpenAI at around $20 billion. Microsoft had put in $1 billion in 2019, and the reports read as the two moving closer still. Neither company confirmed anything.

The same month, Stability AI, behind Stable Diffusion, raised $101 million. Money was flowing to the image side too.

This block is written by the editors. It is kept separate from the sourced record below.

Record3 events

7
PolicyU.S. Department of Commerce / NVIDIA
US imposes sweeping export controls on advanced chips to China
The Bureau of Industry and Security at the US Department of Commerce issued an interim final rule imposing broad controls on exports of advanced computing chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China. Thresholds based on compute performance and interconnect speed meant NVIDIA's A100 and H100 — the workhorses of AI training — and equivalent AMD parts could no longer ship to China without a licence. On the equipment side the rule covered tools able to produce logic at 16nm and below, DRAM at 18nm and below, and NAND with 128 or more layers, and it restricted US persons from supporting advanced chip manufacturing in China. The compute needed to train large models had become an instrument of security policy.
20
BusinessReportedOpenAI / Microsoft
Microsoft reported in talks to boost OpenAI stake at ~$20B valuation
The Information and the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI was in advanced talks with Microsoft to raise more funding. According to The Information, OpenAI had been valued at nearly $20 billion in a stock sale the previous year. Microsoft had invested $1 billion in 2019, and the reports of a deepening relationship came about a month before the launch of ChatGPT.
20
ModelRunway / Stability AI
Runway ships Stable Diffusion 1.5, and Stability AI asks for it down
Runway published Stable Diffusion 1.5, a new version of the image model, on Hugging Face. The same day, Stability AI sent Hugging Face a takedown notice calling it a leak of its intellectual property. Runway answered on the model's own page that the release was made under the Creative ML OpenRAIL-M licence and infringed nothing, and thanked Stability AI for the compute it had donated to retrain the original model. Patrick Esser, who wrote the model, was a Runway researcher. The notice was withdrawn soon afterwards and 1.5 stayed up. The arrangement under which the two had published together in August had become, within two months, an argument about who was allowed to put the weights out.

↑ 2022

US imposes sweeping export controls on advanced chips to China

Microsoft reported in talks to boost OpenAI stake at ~$20B valuation

Runway ships Stable Diffusion 1.5, and Stability AI asks for it down