How to talk about A.I. like an insider

Published

2 years ago

May 21, 2023

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Here’s a list of some terms used by AI insiders:

AGI — AGI stands for “artificial general intelligence.” As a concept, it’s used to mean a significantly more advanced AI than is currently possible, that can do most things as well or better than most humans, including improving itself.

Example: “For me, AGI is the equivalent of a median human that you could hire as a coworker, and they could say do anything you would be happy with a remote coworker doing behind a computer,” Sam Altman said at a recent Greylock VC event.

AI ethics describes the desire to prevent AI from causing immediate harm, and often focuses on questions like how AI systems collect and process data and the possibility of bias in areas like housing or employment.

AI safety describes the longer-term fear that AI will progress so suddenly that a super-intelligent AI might harm or even eliminate humanity.

Alignment is the practice of tweaking an AI model so that it produces the outputs its creators desired. In the short term, alignment refers to the practice of building software and content moderation. But it can also refer to the much larger and still theoretical task of ensuring that any AGI would be friendly towards humanity.

Example: “What these systems get aligned to — whose values, what those bounds are — that is somehow set by society as a whole, by governments. And so creating that dataset, our alignment dataset, it could be, an AI constitution, whatever it is, that has got to come very broadly from society,” Sam Altman said last week during the Senate hearing.

Emergent behavior — Emergent behavior is the technical way of saying that some AI models show abilities that weren’t initially intended. It can also describe surprising results from AI tools being deployed widely to the public.

Example: “Even as a first step, however, GPT-4 challenges a considerable number of widely held assumptions about machine intelligence, and exhibits emergent behaviors and capabilities whose sources and mechanisms are, at this moment, hard to discern precisely,” Microsoft researchers wrote in Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence.

Fast takeoff or hard takeoff — A phrase that suggests if someone succeeds at building an AGI that it will already be too late to save humanity.

Example: “AGI could happen soon or far in the future; the takeoff speed from the initial AGI to more powerful successor systems could be slow or fast,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog post.

Foom — Another way to say “hard takeoff.” It’s an onomatopeia, and has also been described as an acronym for “Fast Onset of Overwhelming Mastery” in several blog posts and essays.

Example: “It’s like you believe in the ridiculous hard take-off ‘foom’ scenario, which makes it sound like you have zero understanding of how everything works,” tweeted Meta AI chief Yann LeCun.

GPU — The chips used to train models and run inference, which are descendants of chips used to play advanced computer games. The most commonly used model at the moment is Nvidia’s A100.

Example: From Stability AI founder Emad Mostque:

Guardrails are software and policies that big tech companies are currently building around AI models to ensure that they don’t leak data or produce disturbing content, which is often called “going off the rails.” It can also refer to specific applications that protect the AI from going off topic, like Nvidia’s “NeMo Guardrails” product.

Example: “The moment for government to play a role has not passed us by this period of focused public attention on AI is precisely the time to define and build the right guardrails to protect people and their interests,” Christina Montgomery, the chair of IBM’s AI ethics board and VP at the company, said in Congress this week.

Inference — The act of using an AI model to make predictions or generate text, images, or other content. Inference can require a lot of computing power.

Example: “The problem with inference is if the workload spikes very rapidly, which is what happened to ChatGPT. It went to like a million users in five days. There is no way your GPU capacity can keep up with that,” Sid Sheth, founder of D-Matrix, previously told CNBC.

Large language model — A kind of AI model that underpins ChatGPT and Google’s new generative AI features. Its defining feature is that it uses terabytes of data to find the statistical relationships between words, which is how it produces text that seems like a human wrote it.

Example: “Google’s new large language model, which the company announced last week, uses almost five times as much training data as its predecessor from 2022, allowing its to perform more advanced coding, math and creative writing tasks,” CNBC reported earlier this week.

Paperclips are an important symbol for AI Safety proponents because they symbolize the chance an AGI could destroy humanity. It refers to a thought experiment published by philosopher Nick Bostrom about a “superintelligence” given the mission to make as many paperclips as possible. It decides to turn all humans, Earth, and increasing parts of the cosmos into paperclips. OpenAI’s logo is a reference to this tale.

Example: “It also seems perfectly possible to have a superintelligence whose sole goal is something completely arbitrary, such as to manufacture as many paperclips as possible, and who would resist with all its might any attempt to alter this goal,” Bostrom wrote in his thought experiment.

Singularity is an older term that’s not used often anymore, but it refers to the moment that technological change becomes self-reinforcing, or the moment of creation of an AGI. It’s a metaphor — literally, singularity refers to the point of a black hole with infinite density.

Example: “The advent of artificial general intelligence is called a singularity because it is so hard to predict what will happen after that,” Tesla CEO Elon Musk said in an interview with CNBC this week.

Technology

Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Published

1 day ago

July 11, 2025

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Google hires Windsurf CEO Varun Mohan, others in latest AI talent deal

Chief executive officer of Google Sundar Pichai.

Marek Antoni Iwanczuk | Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images

Google on Friday made the latest a splash in the AI talent wars, announcing an agreement to bring in Varun Mohan, co-founder and CEO of artificial intelligence coding startup Windsurf.

As part of the deal, Google will also hire other senior Windsurf research and development employees. Google is not investing in Windsurf, but the search giant will take a nonexclusive license to certain Windsurf technology, according to a person familiar with the matter. Windsurf remains free to license its technology to others.

“We’re excited to welcome some top AI coding talent from Windsurf’s team to Google DeepMind to advance our work in agentic coding,” a Google spokesperson wrote in an email. “We’re excited to continue bringing the benefits of Gemini to software developers everywhere.”

The deal between Google and Windsurf comes after the AI coding startup had been in talks with OpenAI for a $3 billion acquisition deal, CNBC reported in April. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The move ratchets up the talent war in AI particularly among prominent companies. Meta has made lucrative job offers to several employees at OpenAI in recent weeks. Most notably, the Facebook parent added Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang to lead its AI strategy as part of a $14.3 billion investment into his startup.

Douglas Chen, another Windsurf co-founder, will be among those joining Google in the deal, Jeff Wang, the startup’s new interim CEO and its head of business for the past two years, wrote in a post on X.

“Most of Windsurf’s world-class team will continue to build the Windsurf product with the goal of maximizing its impact in the enterprise,” Wang wrote.

Windsurf has become more popular this year as an option for so-called vibe coding, which is the process of using new age AI tools to write code. Developers and non-developers have embraced the concept, leading to more revenue for Windsurf and competitors, such as Cursor, which OpenAI also looked at buying. All the interest has led investors to assign higher valuations to the startups.

This isn’t the first time Google has hired select people out of a startup. It did the same with Character.AI last summer. Amazon and Microsoft have also absorbed AI talent in this fashion, with the Adept and Inflection deals, respectively.

Microsoft is pushing an agent mode in its Visual Studio Code editor for vibe coding. In April, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said AI is composing as much of 30% of his company’s code.

The Verge reported the Google-Windsurf deal earlier on Friday.

WATCH: Google pushes “AI Mode” on homepage

Technology

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang sells more than $36 million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Published

2 days ago

July 11, 2025

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Nvidia's Jensen Huang sells more than million in stock, catches Warren Buffett in net worth

Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, holds a motherboard as he speaks during the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, France, on June 11, 2025.

Gonzalo Fuentes | Reuters

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang unloaded roughly $36.4 million worth of stock in the leading artificial intelligence chipmaker, according to a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing.

The sale, which totals 225,000 shares, comes as part of Huang’s previously adopted plan in March to unload up to 6 million shares of Nvidia through the end of the year. He sold his first batch of stock from the agreement in June, equaling about $15 million.

Last year, the tech executive sold about $700 million worth of shares as part of a prearranged plan. Nvidia stock climbed about 1% Friday.

Huang’s net worth has skyrocketed as investors bet on Nvidia’s AI dominance and graphics processing units powering large language models.

The 62-year-old’s wealth has grown by more than a quarter, or about $29 billion, since the start of 2025 alone, based on Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index. His net worth last stood at $143 billion in the index, putting him neck-and-neck with Berkshire Hathaway‘s Warren Buffett at $144 billion.

Shortly after the market opened Friday, Fortune‘s analysis of net worth had Huang ahead of Buffett, with the Nvidia CEO at $143.7 billion and the Oracle of Omaha at $142.1 billion.

Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Published

2 days ago

July 11, 2025

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Tesla to officially launch in India with planned showroom opening

Elon Musk meets with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Blair House in Washington DC, USA on February 13, 2025.

Anadolu | Anadolu | Getty Images

Tesla will open a showroom in Mumbai, India next week, marking the U.S. electric carmakers first official foray into the country.

The one and a half hour launch event for the Tesla “Experience Center” will take place on July 15 at the Maker Maxity Mall in Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, according to an event invitation seen by CNBC.

Along with the showroom display, which will feature the company’s cars, Tesla is also likely to officially launch direct sales to Indian customers.

The automaker has had its eye on India for a while and now appears to have stepped up efforts to launch locally.

In April, Tesla boss Elon Musk spoke with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to discuss collaboration in areas including technology and innovation. That same month, the EV-maker’s finance chief said the company has been “very careful” in trying to figure out when to enter the market.

Tesla has no manufacturing operations in India, even though the country’s government is likely keen for the company to establish a factory. Instead the cars sold in India will need to be imported from Tesla’s other manufacturing locations in places like Shanghai, China, and Berlin, Germany.

As Tesla begins sales in India, it will come up against challenges from long-time Chinese rival BYD, as well as local player Tata Motors.

One potential challenge for Tesla comes by way of India’s import duties on electric vehicles, which stand at around 70%. India has tried to entice investment in the country by offering companies a reduced duty of 15% if they commit to invest $500 million and set up manufacturing locally.

HD Kumaraswamy, India’s minister for heavy industries, told reporters in June that Tesla is “not interested” in manufacturing in the country, according to a Reuters report.

Tesla is looking to recruit roles in Mumbai, job listings posted on LinkedIn . These include advisors working in showrooms, security, vehicle operators to collect data for its Autopilot feature and service technicians.

There are also roles being advertised in the Indian capital of New Delhi, including for store managers. It’s unclear if Tesla is planning to launch a showroom in the city.