Bitcoin News Australia

This year’s CEO darling, Sam Altman, was ousted from this year’s darling company, OpenAI, on Friday afternoon and the tech world is shook.

Like, “everyone immediately invoked Steve Jobs’ 1985 removal from Apple” levels of shook.

It’s an apt comparison — or at least it was at the time of this writing.

• It took Jobs 12 years to return to Apple; by the time you read this, Altman may already be back, with the board members who engineered his exit gone instead.

Then again, this being a total shitstorm, we may not gain satisfying answers about OpenAI’s future anytime too soon.

No matter how the week starts, it won’t be short on intrigue. Here are a few other storylines we’re following…

Will this debacle help make AI safer?

Reports have identified the company’s speed of development as one source of the rift between the board (believing OpenAI’s moving too fast) and Altman (believing OpenAI’s moving too slow).

This checks out; as OpenAI shifted from nonprofit to an $80B company flush with VC cash and the world’s hottest product in ChatGPT, its trajectory made a hard shift. Satisfying investors has a way of trampling humble, mission-driven beginnings.

• If anything can force other growth-obsessed AI companies to re-evaluate their own rate of progress and the safeguards needed along the way, it’s a theatrical, destabilizing boardroom disaster at the industry leader.

Did the “slow things down” board move too fast?

The shock among OpenAI employees suggests the upper ranks hid its rancor well — until, suddenly, it really didn’t.

But another smoking gun suggests the board — which wanted to pump the brakes on Altman’s rapid expansion — would’ve been helped by heeding its own advice: Microsoft, OpenAI’s most critical partner with $13B+ invested in, was blindsided by Friday’s move.

• Changing executive leadership is a high-wire act even when there’s clear cause. Making a rash move like this Altman ouster wasn’t just playing with fire; it was cannonballing into a volcano.

Can we protect our nation’s business professors?

Listen, they’ve been awake since Friday, mainlining info about OpenAI’s abnormal board structure and prepping lessons about the importance of internal alignment, and they’re not gonna stop talking about this story until they fall over.

• If you see a prof about to finally peter out, maybe put some cushions down to break their tumble?

Let’s get the grossest part out of the way: Eel guts. Lobster viscera. Salmon blood.

…OK, it’s safe now. (And by the way, if you think reading those words sucked, just imagine smelling them.)

The problem we’re talking about here is a simple one: Experts project anywhere from 25% up to a whole half of all harvested seafood in the US winds up in dumpsters. (The UN estimate for the global seafood supply: 35% wasted.)

• Large-scale operations — e.g. food manufacturers cutting off the most valuable parts and binning the rest — bear responsibility, but that time you only ate half of your halibut counts too.

The scale of the issue

In the US alone, commercial fisheries brought 8.6B+ pounds of seafood to port, worth $6.5B, as of 2021. That’s a ton o’ tuna — and the best-case scenario may be losing one-fourth of it.

So, what can be done? In Maine — a valuable seafood market responsible for 82% of US lobsters — some enterprising startups are looking to convert that waste into value, per Portland Press-Herald:

• Maine Garum Co. is upending fish sauce production by using discarded eel parts.
• Coast of Maine Organic Products makes garden products with lobster, crab, salmon, and seaweed leftovers.
• Everything Seaweed hopes to turn residual seaweed into nanofibers that’d replace chemical coatings used in nonstick kitchenware.
• Salmonics, a biotech company, is researching regenerative medicine and pain treatment applications for the planet’s millions of wasted liters of salmon blood. (Yes, really.)

This shouldn’t be a hard pitch

Producing waste isn’t necessarily losing the seafood industry money today, but finding secondary usages for their scraps could offer additional revenue streams.

Bristol Seafood, which told the Press-Herald it’s been marine-waste-free for two years, models that potential monetization: its fish remnants are ground up into pet food, its fish bones turned into fertilizer, and its leftover scales add shimmer to lipsticks and nail polishes.

Another part of the equation: Grocery store lighting, oddly enough. Most seafood has a short shelf life, with US grocers trashing 55m+ pounds of fish annually. Finding the right lighting can extend freshness — and dampen unappetizing fishy smells enough to increase sales.

30%: Percentage of US adults who say they regularly get the news from Facebook. Interestingly, while only 14% of US adults say they get news from TikTok, among TikTok users, 43% say they regularly get news there, up from 22% in 2022.

2m+: Number of Bluesky users. The Twitter alternative launched in February, hitting its first 1m users in September. Bluesky plans to launch a public web interface soon, and will join the fediverse next year. (WTF is the fediverse? Glad you asked. We got you.)

$49m: How much the UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital claims Mattel owes it. Per the hospital’s breach-of-contract lawsuit, the toymaker pledged the donation in 2017, but only gave a few million dollars and some toys. Mattel argues that its donation was meant for a new tower UCLA has since decided not to build. Mattel isn’t doing too shabby these days, with Barbie sales up 16% thanks to Barbie, the year’s top-grossing film at $1.4B+.

$61.71: The estimated cost of a Thanksgiving meal for 10, per the American Farm Bureau Federation, down 4.5% YoY, but up 25% from 2019. This feast includes turkey (down 5.6% in cost YoY), cranberries, sweet potatoes, veggies, stuffing, rolls, and pie — but not mashed potatoes which is a real travesty.