OpenAI Mafia 💰

CHART OF THE WEEK

Everyone and their grandma is hopping on the AI bandwagon. First up?

*Checks notes*

*Double-checks notes*

*Triple-checks notes*

Bing.

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Yes, Microsoft’s Bing is now an AI player. They’re rolling out a new AI-assisted search and Google needs to be scared—or so the media narrative goes. Early reviews said this could be Microsoft’s “iPhone moment.”

Pause for a moment as your worldview struggles to reorient around that possibility.

But maybe Google should be scared, actually, especially after it previewed its own AI chatbot, Bard, and the poor guy whiffed on the facts in broad daylight, wiping out $100B in Google's market cap.

This is more than a month after Sundar Pichai put Google staff onto “code red” to rush out an AI competitor after ChatGPT launched and kicked off the frenzy. Which is ironic because ChatGPT is famously known to get facts wrong all the time, as A.Team’s Joe Lazer wrote in his entertaining yet mildly unhinged newsletter.

What you may not know: ChatGPT itself wasn’t a mastermind product that OpenAI had been working on for years. No—it was rushed out in 13 days. The team was working on releasing GPT-4—the next big update in the AI model—when the OpenAI exec team got spooked that a competitor would steal their thunder by releasing a show-stealing chatbot. So they said screw it, and built one themselves based on the “GPT-3.5” tech they had available.

With every startup and enterprise having emergency meetings about what their AI angle will be, it’s no wonder that venture capital has been pouring money into the pet projects of anyone who ever worked at OpenAI.

In the last five years more than 30 employees have quit OpenAI and raised more than $1 billion for new projects. One thing’s for sure: There's going to be an arms race to build fast and ship.

A.Team Adds 18 Industry Luminaries to Its CxO Network

This week A.Team (that’s us) revealed that 18 c-suite-level leaders are joining their CxO Network—a group of visionaries shaping the next generation of innovation by working with A.Team's market-leading startups, growth stage, and enterprise companies.

The founding cohort includes industry luminaries such as AJ Thomas, Chaos Pilot and former Head of People at Google X Ventures, Wagner Denuzzo, VP of Organizational Effectiveness at Prudential, and Meng Chee, former Chief Product Officer at Walmart.

So why’d they join? They want a new challenge. They’ve already beat the “corporate video game.” Now they’re asking themselves, What's next? They don't want to replay the same old challenges again. They’re looking to get involved in the next transformative idea—like building the TikTok for textbooks with McGraw Hill.

The CxO Network is a new take on a fast-developing trend in tech. Fractional CxOs have exploded in popularity in the remote work age, as startups and enterprises alike look to infuse their growth initiatives with badly-needed c-suite-level expertise. Too often, though, the impact of fractional CxOs is limited to a Powerpoint deck that never gets acted on. But an A.Team of world-class builders can turn that vision into reality.

‍Learn More

NYC EVENTS

Join Us for Health Tech Happy Hour

A.Team is co-hosting a happy hour for health tech innovators on February 21st in midtown. Come join us for some mixing and mingling alongside fellow healthtech builders and founders, and hear from top investors on their outlook on the funding environment in 2023 and beyond.

There'll be great food and drinks and even better people.

RSVP Here

MISSION MUST-READS

• ‍The Great Betrayal: After Callous Layoffs, Workers Are Done With the Full-Time Work Model‍

• Introducing the CxO Network: Get a George Clooney to Lead Your 'Ocean's 11'-Style Team‍

PARTING TWEET