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OpenAI Files For IPO

Slashdot
3 weeks 6 days ago
OpenAI has confidentially filed for an IPO, "setting it up for what may be the most highly anticipated market debut in recent history and a massive payday for early investors," reports CNN. The decision follows recent IPO announcements from Anthropic and SpaceX. From the report: OpenAI said it has not decided on timing yet. And because the filing is confidential, it's not yet clear how many shares the company plans to sell or at what price. "It may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company," it said in a post on its newsroom page. But the company said the filing "gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best." The transition to a public company will give Wall Street a window into OpenAI's finances as the company pours billions into AI infrastructure and computing resources. Investors dumped tech stocks last week as they questioned whether a recent run-up in those shares had gone too far. OpenAI was last valued at $852 billion after raising $122 billion in March, but it's faced pressure to demonstrate it can generate the cash to match that valuation.

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Meta Deletes Face-Recognition System From Its Smart Glasses App

Slashdot
4 weeks ago
Last Thursday, Wired reported that Meta had quietly embedded an unreleased facial recognition system called NameTag into software installed on millions of phones. In a follow-up report, Wired says the tech giant has now removed the face-recognition-related code, while saying "no final decision" has been made about whether the feature will launch. From the report: On Thursday, WIRED reported that Meta had quietly integrated substantial portions of the NameTag system into the Meta AI app. Though never publicly enabled, the feature was designed to convert faces captured by the glasses into unique biometric signatures, commonly known as faceprints, and compare them against a database of faceprints stored on the user's device. WIRED also found that faces the system failed to recognize were cropped, indexed, and stored locally for future processing. NameTag first surfaced in February, when The New York Times, citing internal Meta documents, reported that the company was developing face recognition for its smart glasses and weighing a launch as soon as this year. One memo reportedly described releasing it during a "dynamic political environment," when privacy and civil liberties advocates would be distracted. Last week, WIRED reported that much of NameTag's machinery was already built into the Meta AI app, downloaded by millions of users, as early as January, even as Meta publicly said it had made no final decision about face recognition. After WIRED's report, Stone dismissed the findings, writing that the company couldn't answer questions about how the system would work because "the feature does not exist." Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer, called the reporting "incredibly misleading" and "absolutely dishonest." [...] The newly released version of Meta AI removes nearly all traces of the feature Meta said did not yet exist. Gone is the face-recognition software itself, along with the code that ran the NameTag recognition process and the "Person recognized" alert the app would have shown if someone were identified. The update also strips out a folder where the app would have stored the cropped images and biometric signatures of faces it captured but could not identify. [...] A few fragments of the NameTag system remain in the version of latest Meta AI, including an internal debug menu label and a dormant link meant to open a recognized person's profile. The leftover code points to parts of the system that are no longer there.

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