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2024

July

4 events

Editors' summary

OpenAI reaches for search, Microsoft steps off the board

In a letter dated 9 July, Microsoft gave up its non-voting observer seat on OpenAI's board — a seat it had taken after the removal of Sam Altman in November 2023 and held for eight months. It came while competition authorities in the US and UK were looking at the relationship. The news broke on the 10th, and OpenAI said it would have no observers going forward.

On the 18th, OpenAI released GPT-4o mini at 15 cents per million input tokens, more than 60% below GPT-3.5 Turbo, and it replaced GPT-3.5 in ChatGPT the same day.

On the 25th came SearchGPT, a search prototype with named links to sources, limited at first to 10,000 users and publishers. Alphabet shares fell on the news.

On the 23rd, Meta released Llama 3.1 at 405 billion parameters, free to use.

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

Record4 events
  1. 9
    GovernanceMicrosoft / OpenAI

    Microsoft gives up its observer seat on OpenAI's board

    Microsoft relinquished the non-voting observer seat it held on OpenAI's board. In a letter dated 9 July, it wrote that it had "witnessed significant progress by the newly formed board" over the past eight months and no longer believed its limited role as an observer was necessary; the news was reported the following day. Microsoft had taken the seat at the end of November 2023, after the crisis over Sam Altman's removal. It came while competition authorities in the US and UK were examining the relationship, and was read as a move made with regulators in mind. OpenAI said it would have no observers going forward, ending speculation that an Apple executive would take one.

  2. 18
    ModelOpenAI

    GPT-4o mini arrives and replaces GPT-3.5 Turbo

    OpenAI released GPT-4o mini, a small, inexpensive model priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens — more than 60% below GPT-3.5 Turbo. It has a 128K context window, handles text and images, and supports the same languages as GPT-4o. In ChatGPT it replaced GPT-3.5 for Free, Plus and Team users the same day. The pricing was also a marker of how far the cost of frontier-class models had fallen in two years.

  3. 23
    ModelMeta / Mark Zuckerberg

    Llama 3.1 405B puts open weights at frontier scale

    Meta released Llama 3.1 in three sizes — 8, 70, and 405 billion parameters — the largest a dense Transformer with a 128,000-token context window, sixteen times its predecessor, trained on more than 15 trillion tokens across 16,000 H100s. It supported tool use and eight languages and was licensed for commercial use. It was the first time a model that could hold its own against the closed frontier was available to anyone as weights. It completed the Llama 3 line begun in April with the 8B and 70B models. In an open letter the same day, Mark Zuckerberg argued that AI would follow the path from closed Unix to open-source Linux, with open models becoming the industry standard. Being able to own frontier-level capability rather than rent it fed straight back into how the other labs priced and published.

  4. 25
    ProductOpenAI

    OpenAI shows SearchGPT, a search prototype

    OpenAI unveiled SearchGPT, a prototype that answers conversationally using up-to-date information from the web. Access was limited at launch to 10,000 users and publishers, and the company framed it as a temporary prototype. Answers carry clear, named, in-line links to sources, and OpenAI said sites that opt out of training its generative models can still appear in search results. It said the best of these features would be folded into ChatGPT itself. Alphabet shares fell on the news.

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