AI Update, December 27, 2024: AI News and Views From the Past Week

Catch up on select AI news and developments from the past week or so (in no particular order):

OpenAI outlines plan to shift into a for-profit public benefit corporation. OpenAI has announced plans to transition into a for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC) by 2025 to raise capital for advancing artificial general intelligence. The new structure will place control in a for-profit arm, while the existing nonprofit will retain equity but lose oversight. The nonprofit will focus on initiatives in healthcare, education, and science. This mirrors competitors Anthropic and xAI that operate as PBCs. However, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg have filed motions to block the transition, citing concerns about governance and control. Importance for marketers: OpenAI's restructuring could accelerate AI advancements, providing marketers with more powerful AI tools for automation, content creation, and customer engagement.

DeepSeek-V3 open-source AI model surpasses Meta's Llama and Qwen. DeepSeek has unveiled DeepSeek-V3, an ultra-large open-source AI model with 671 billion parameters that outperforms Meta's Llama 3.1-405B and Qwen 2.5-72B in benchmarks. Its mixture-of-experts architecture activates select parameters, improving efficiency. The model excels in Chinese and math-centric tasks, challenging even closed systems like GPT-4o. Despite its $5.57 million training cost—significantly lower than competitors'—DeepSeek-V3 is accessible through Hugging Face and GitHub. Importance for marketers: DeepSeek-V3 expands affordable AI options, allowing marketers to integrate cutting-edge AI for analytics and content creation without relying on costly proprietary models.

Sam Altman seeks feedback from users to shape OpenAI's 2025 roadmap. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman used X to gather user suggestions for improving OpenAI's products in 2025. Suggestions included family accounts with child-friendly guardrails, better voice-chat features, and enhancements to Sora, OpenAI's text-to-video model. This follows a turbulent year involving legal disputes with Elon Musk and record-breaking $6.6 billion in funding. Altman's outreach underscores a focus on user-driven innovation and product refinement. Importance for marketers: ... continue reading below