Frederic Lardieg’s Post

New week, new episode from the prolific affaire Sam Altman, Sam is said to have been hired by Microsoft https://lnkd.in/e4Nu2y5Z According to a report by Wired, "Nearly 500 employees of OpenAl have signed a letter saying they may quit and join Sam Altman at Microsoft unless the startup's board resigns and reappoints the ousted CEO." reported by Gary Marcus : No Sam went in, said make me King and give me legal absolution, or I leave at 5 and start a new company. Instead, this craziness has happened instead. Someone called his bluff. Emily Chang has posted: - interim CEO Mira Murati plans to rehire Sam and Greg, and is in talks with board rep Adam D’Angelo to do so (in what capacity is not yet finalized) - however, concurrently, the OpenAI board is looking to hire its own CEO, and has reached out to two candidates that we’ve spoken to, both prominent execs - yet again situation is very fluid and could change at any moment - told you it was wild Huge kudos to @ashleevance @edludlow @dinabass https://lnkd.in/ef8kXkZr ———- I aagree with Gary that Sam must have been accused of a major wrong doing to be sacked that way. Although the board must have realised how the brand could be connected to Sam. Will he join Microsoft? Currently, Microsoft shares are going down.

WHY IS IT NOT OBVIOUS? https://lnkd.in/dki5mJ5j See my post from a few days back as soon as the #Altman episode came up in the news. Some over zealous and holier than thou Board of Directors who, have no financial accountability other than their sittings fees decided to sack the guy who invented a tool to change the way the world thinks and works. These 5 social media nerds and a car maker are all competent blokes. But lose nothing but their sitting fees if OpenAi dies. Brings to question Board Governance. It is also true that maveric brilliant founders don’t and are not always compliant by definition. But their “license to kill” must be curtailed that’s for sure. Self governance is not reliable. The maker and checker cannot be the same. The better way to do this is for founders to report to a whole time chairman paid well who will guide and guard. Guide the founder of bettering working methods but more importantly guard the company of malpractice. Now Altman is back in his saddle. Sack the board members first. And get some sensible people, not necessarily famous.

Colossyan was not actually my first try at founding a business – because my first business failed. Why? Because the world just wasn’t ready. Defudger was a tool built to combat the rise of deepfake video, and the dangers it brings for verifiable news media. It was a good idea! And an important one! I think it still is. But the issue was not with the idea, or our technical execution of it. It was that no one was interested in paying for it. Now, there’s definitely a conversation to be had around how seriously companies are taking the issue of deepfakes, and how late it will be when that finally changes – but that shouldn’t have been the conversation we were having. It should have been: “Is there a market for this?” “Is this sustainable as a business?” “Who is asking for this?” Mistake made. Lesson learned. And it wasn’t a complete loss – everything we learned about AI-generated content went directly into Colossyan. Failure is only failure if you don’t pick yourself back up again.

Meet Emad Mostaque. He’s the controversial CEO of Stability AI, a hot startup that has seen more ups and downs than a Real Housewives reunion episode. The good news is: Stability AI is shipping incredible AI products. They’ve got their flagship image generator SDXL 1.0, which IMHO takes 3rd place behind Midjourney and DALL-E 3, plus: Stable Audio: create music from text prompts. SDXL Turbo (NEW): instantaneous image generation (<1 second). Stable Video (NEW): turns images into short videos (like this Guy Looking Back meme!). Plus 10+ nifty editing tools like swapping items, upscaling, replacing backgrounds, and more (all FREE on Clipdop). The incredible thing about Stability is that it open-sources its image model, meaning anyone can build products on top of it (unlike Midjourney/OpenAI). The bad news is: when you’re making free stuff, it’s really hard to make money. This is why Stability failed to raise money at a $4B valuation (!) earlier this year—it ended up settling for $25M and $50M convertibles notes in June and November. To make matters worse, CEO Mostaque is wanted gone by investors after prompting a staff exodus and being exposed as a rampant liar via Forbes’ brutal exposé.

Thrilled to see our very own Kevin Magan featured in TechCrunch discussing our recent investment in Storyblok! Their innovative approach to content management is paving the way for the future, and we’re thrilled to be part of their journey. 🚀 #TechCrunch #Storyblok #ContentManagement #FutureTech

Yesterday, I hosted an agency ops webinar with 254 signups and 108 attendees. And I kicked it off by talking about speedrunning Super Mario 64. Why? Because it perfectly connects to AI in agency operations, that's why. I swear I pulled off the metaphor. See video below for proof. P.S. If you want the webinar recording, leave a like for reach and DM me. I'll share the recording once it's ready. P.P.S. Relative to my previous events the # of signups and attendees was exciting—but can somebody with deeper expertise tell me if the proportion of signups vs. attendees was a healthy one? P.P.P.S. What's your favorite Mario game? Mine's Super Mario All-Stars on SNES.

What's up, Product Hunt friends. 😻 If you're a new OR seasoned investor, check out RAFA AI's upcoming launch! 🚀 I'm excited about this launch because I am not exaggerating when I say that they are REVOLUTIONIZING investing. RAFA is like having your own team of AI agents — personalized based on your portfolio — with each focused on a specialization: ✔️ Fundamental analysis ✔️ Technicals ✔️ Momentum ✔️ Macro If this interests you, show them some love by subscribing to their Coming Soon page on Product Hunt. Sharing it in the comments below!

Sometimes you have to make extremely hard decisions as a founder and team. We have made the decision to REMOVE all AI features from Storygrounds. Since last November, we’ve been in Alpha mode and have learned AN ELEPHANT LOAD. 🐘 Some Learnings: - Readers are enjoying visual quests, sharing their ideas on stories, and getting feedback from comic creators. - Readers want quests to have even more impact on the comic story. - Readers want to be able to submit their own hand-drawn creations. - Readers wanted more organization of the actions they completed and still have available. - Making the quest experience smooth and easy to understand is key. With the consent of our creators, we tested GenAI as a visual communication tool between creators and their fan communities (never part of the comic making process). We’ve gotten quite mixed feedback, its clear that a lot of creators and readers don't want AI in their creative platforms. Given our stance towards ensuring creators are first, we are taking action on the feedback by removing GenAI from our product in its entirety. We didn’t make this decision to remove GenAI from the platform lightly, but it was an easy decision for the type of space that we wish to create alongside creators. The speed and proliferation of GenAI is incredible, I think there are going to be some amazing breakthroughs and people are developing incredible tools and products for the next gen of consumer. I just believe that flying 4,000 mph headlong into the AI revolution isn't necessary to fix a lot of problems for content creators and their fans today and deliver the best stories possible, and that is where we are going to be focused. There is time to do a lot and grow a lot and see where things go, and to see how creators and readers feel about the content that is created with AI and the tools themselves. We continue to ship awesome features, sign amazing creators, and create incredible stories with mind-blowing art. I am excited for our definitive product release soon, and starting to scale. Thank you Linda Giang for being an amazing voice to our community. Thank you to the entire Storygrounds team for being the best team in the business, and thank you to our partners at Makers Fund and Fabric Ventures (and others) for being incredible partners.

👻 CSMs: How many times have you been "ghosted" by a client this year? ❓ Have you tried sending a video to your executive point of contact? 💡 Research shoes that 59% of senior executives report they’d rather watch a video than read text. Furthermore, CSMs can expect a 8x higher open-to-reply ratio with video messages. 🎇 That's why Gemma Cipriani-Espineira, other CS Angels, and I have invested in Sendspark! We believe in the mission that Bethany Stachenfeld & ✨ Brandon Escalante are driving to bring personalized AI videos at scale to the market. Read more about the investment below and visit Sendspark.com to try it for free. https://lnkd.in/gMU5bvv6

This mornings Open AI news cycle of a new board and the return of the ousted Altman brings an opportunity to talk about how to avoid blame, and how to get at what’s actually causality. Because if you don’t, you just risk destroying people caught up in the saga, and having the same issues reoccur in a new variant, or inadvertently create new ones from the poorly conceived change. Root cause and getting to causality (and just accountability) is about human choices and decisions; or lack of them. It’s not about processes or widgets - it’s about the decisions that created them and then executed them. The departing board members have in some reports taken a real brow beating. They weren’t upto the role so it’s said. Okay. So consider this: Who set the role and activities of the board? Who picked the board members? And just to play a different card, take a look at some of the more recent world changing “startup” blow ups for poor leadership and dishonesty. Many of their boards had big resumes. Some less so. What was missing in those board governance choices and decisions ?