Technology
The AI Shake-Up: Grok Cuts, OpenAI Locks Down
In this episode of The AI Chat Podcast, host Jane Schaefer dives into the latest AI news, including significant layoffs at Elon Musk's startup Grok, OpenAI's new safety measures for ChatGPT,...
The AI Shake-Up: Grok Cuts, OpenAI Locks Down
Technology •
0:00 / 0:00
Interactive Transcript
spk_0
Welcome to the AI chat podcast. I'm your host Jane Schaefer. Today on the show
spk_0
We're going to be covering the top 10 AI news stories of the week in rapid fire before we get into that if you want to try using
spk_0
AI to build a tool for you, you can go to AIbox.ai my own startup,
spk_0
Describe the tool you're imagining and have our AI build it out. We'll connect all of the different AI models together, fill in the prompts, build the UI, and make something incredible for you.
spk_0
If you want to check it out, there's a link in the description to AIbox.ai
spk_0
A Harvard law student took one trademark class and ended up raising $90 million to fight a $3 trillion crime industry. This is Mark Lee. He co-founded Mark Vision, which is an AI startup that hunts down counterfeit products online.
spk_0
It started as a software with humans in the loop and now it is full on AI led service platform. It just closed a $48 million series,
spk_0
which is backed by Salesforce ventures and Y combinator's Michael C. Dull. Here's the twist. Mark Vision isn't just deleting fake cinema. It's actually helping brands recover revenue. So clients report that they have a 5% sales boost after using the platform,
spk_0
which is already scaled to $20 million in annual recurring revenue in just four years. So from law school case studies to redefining brand protection,
spk_0
Mark's vision is definitely proving one thing fighting fakes isn't just a side hustle. It is a $10 trillion AI opportunity.
spk_0
Elon's AI startup just fired 500 workers overnight. One third of its core data team XAI, the company behind GROC told their employees that their general AI tutor roles were gone effective immediately.
spk_0
But here's a twist. Musk isn't shrinking the company. He's pivoting hard. He's ditching generalists to hire 10 times more specialists in medicine, finance, STEM, and safety. In other words, GROC won't just be a chatbot anymore. It's being rebuilt as an army of expert tutors.
spk_0
Why this matters is because the data annotations team that trained GROC in the first place is cutting its signal and basically this is a bet that domain expertise is going to beat brute force labeling. If this works, GROC could leapfrog rivals with specialist grade intelligence.
spk_0
But if it fails, Musk just get it the foundation of his own AI. So the big question is, is this a genius masterstroke or the moment XAI traded its backbone for a gamble on specialists?
spk_0
Open AI is putting chat GBT on lockdown. Sam Altman just announced a huge shift. There's going to be no more flirty conversations with the users under 18. There's going to be extra guardrails around suicide and self harm. And in extreme cases, chat GBT could even call your parents or the police.
spk_0
This comes after a really tragic lawsuit, including one where there's a parent that claims chat GBT's influence their son's suicide. And parents will now get new tools like setting blackout hours when chat GBT shuts off for their kids. And open AI says that one in doubt it's going to default to these strictest rules.
spk_0
This all dropped the same day as a Senate hearing on the quote harm of AI chat box work, grieving families and lawmakers are pushing for stricter regulations. The big question is, is this responsible safety or is this the start of the heavy handed AI censorship?
spk_0
Amazon just launched an AI agent to help sellers complete tasks and manage their businesses. You can imagine this, if you're a seller, you know, you're reviewing inventory, Amazon's AI is going to flag slow moving products. It's going to warn you about storage fees and it's going to tell you whether to cut prices or to just remove them entirely.
spk_0
It can it can even check um compliances across every country that you sell in automatically and it doesn't stop their Amazon's AI can now write your ads. It can analyze your demand and it can prep shipping strategies while you are sleeping. So I think this is part of kind of a bigger race.
spk_0
Google just launched their own payments protocol with agents and I think now Amazon is kind of firing back with their own always on commerce assistant. So what's the bottom line running an Amazon business just I think shifted from late nights and spreadsheets to AI doing the heavy lifting for you and saving you a ton of time.
spk_0
Salesforce just launched a war room for the Pentagon. It's called a mission force and it doesn't just sell CRM's it sells decisions opening an anthropic of already pitched the government tears for one dollar and Google's Gemini for government starts at 47 cents for the first year.
spk_0
There's that interesting thing happening with the pricing right now why it matters is because basically once an AI company runs the personnel logistics and battlefield decision making a vendor who is using them is pretty locked in they own the workflow and the doctrine that is used.
spk_0
So here's the playbook that nobody is saying out loud if they make it cheap they make it indispensable and then they grow with every mission the contracts right now are opaque and the stakes are absolutely massive. If Salesforce turns their pipeline into war fighting readiness they're not just going to track out accounts they're going to be they're going to be shaping outcome.
spk_0
So you can ask yourself when the AI writes the checklist this and schedules the convoy's a briefs the commander is that still software or is it the operating system of national power.
spk_0
Thank you so much for tuning into the AI chat podcast if you prefer episodes that are a deep dive on one particular topic or interviews we also have lots of that content on the show so just feel free to take whatever you prefer from the show make sure to go check out a box dot AI if you want to get access to the top 40 different and models all in one place without having to pay subscriptions to
spk_0
all of the different platforms for $20 a month you can go check out a box dot AI we have an amazing AI model playground that people love would love to have you as part of it thank you so much for tuning into the podcast today and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day.