• How OpenAI so royally screwed up the Sam Altman firing and joining Microsoft

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    https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/19/tech/sam-altman-open-ai-firing-board/index.html

     

    https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/18/tech/openai-sam-altman-shakeup-what-happened/index.html

     

    https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/20/tech/sam-altman-joins-microsoft/index.html

     

     

    A company’s board of directors has an obligation, first and foremost, to its shareholders. OpenAI’s most important shareholder is Microsoft, the company that gave Altman & Co. $13 billion to help Bing, Office, Windows and Azure leapfrog Google and stay ahead of Amazon, IBM and other AI wannabes.

     

    So a day later, the board reportedly asked for a mulligan and tried to woo Altman back. It was a shocking turn of events and an embarrassing self-own by a company that its widely regarded as the most promising producer of the most exciting new technology.

     

    The board angered a powerful ally and could be forever changed because of the way it handled Altman’s ouster. It could end up with Altman back at the helm, a for-profit company on its nonprofit board – and a massive culture shift at OpenAI.

     

    https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67474879

     

    But Microsoft, OpenAI’s biggest investor, has decided not to take a chance on Mr Altman taking this tech elsewhere. He will be joining the Seattle-based tech giant, it has been announced, to lead a yet-to-be-created AI research team. His co-founder Greg Brockman goes with him, and judging from the number of staff members posting on X today, it looks like he’ll be taking some of OpenAI’s top talent too.

     

    Many OpenAI staff members are sharing the same post on X. It reads: “OpenAI is nothing without its people”.

     

    Is that a warning to Mr Shear that he might have some hiring to do? A BBC colleague outside OpenAI’s headquarters just told me at 0930 in San Francisco, there were no signs of people arriving for work.

     

    https://edition.cnn.com/2023/11/20/tech/openai-employees-quit-mira-murati-sam-altman/index.html

     

    “Your actions have made it obvious that you are incapable of overseeing OpenAI,” wrote the employees. “We are unable to work for or with people that lack competence, judgement and care for our mission and employees.”

     

    The employees also warned that they would “imminently” follow Altman to Microsoft unless the board resigns and reinstates Altman and Greg Brockman, the former OpenAI president who was also removed by the board on Friday.

  • HDR and Color

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    https://www.soundandvision.com/content/nits-and-bits-hdr-and-color

    In HD we often refer to the range of available colors as a color gamut. Such a color gamut is typically plotted on a two-dimensional diagram, called a CIE chart, as shown in at the top of this blog. Each color is characterized by its x/y coordinates.

    Good enough for government work, perhaps. But for HDR, with its higher luminance levels and wider color, the gamut becomes three-dimensional.

    For HDR the color gamut therefore becomes a characteristic we now call the color volume. It isn’t easy to show color volume on a two-dimensional medium like the printed page or a computer screen, but one method is shown below. As the luminance becomes higher, the picture eventually turns to white. As it becomes darker, it fades to black. The traditional color gamut shown on the CIE chart is simply a slice through this color volume at a selected luminance level, such as 50%.

    Three different color volumes—we still refer to them as color gamuts though their third dimension is important—are currently the most significant. The first is BT.709 (sometimes referred to as Rec.709), the color gamut used for pre-UHD/HDR formats, including standard HD.

    The largest is known as BT.2020; it encompasses (roughly) the range of colors visible to the human eye (though ET might find it insufficient!).

    Between these two is the color gamut used in digital cinema, known as DCI-P3.

    sRGB

    D65

     

  • Black Body color aka the Planckian Locus curve for white point eye perception

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    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation

     

    Black-body radiation is the type of electromagnetic radiation within or surrounding a body in thermodynamic equilibrium with its environment, or emitted by a black body (an opaque and non-reflective body) held at constant, uniform temperature. The radiation has a specific spectrum and intensity that depends only on the temperature of the body.

     

    A black-body at room temperature appears black, as most of the energy it radiates is infra-red and cannot be perceived by the human eye. At higher temperatures, black bodies glow with increasing intensity and colors that range from dull red to blindingly brilliant blue-white as the temperature increases.

    The Black Body Ultraviolet Catastrophe Experiment

     

    In photography, color temperature describes the spectrum of light which is radiated from a “blackbody” with that surface temperature. A blackbody is an object which absorbs all incident light — neither reflecting it nor allowing it to pass through.

     

    The Sun closely approximates a black-body radiator. Another rough analogue of blackbody radiation in our day to day experience might be in heating a metal or stone: these are said to become “red hot” when they attain one temperature, and then “white hot” for even higher temperatures. Similarly, black bodies at different temperatures also have varying color temperatures of “white light.”

     

    Despite its name, light which may appear white does not necessarily contain an even distribution of colors across the visible spectrum.

     

    Although planets and stars are neither in thermal equilibrium with their surroundings nor perfect black bodies, black-body radiation is used as a first approximation for the energy they emit. Black holes are near-perfect black bodies, and it is believed that they emit black-body radiation (called Hawking radiation), with a temperature that depends on the mass of the hole.