Scarlet Johansson hits out at OpenAI

Dear hustlers, founders, operators and visionaries out there!

This is our first edition of the Follow the Gradient newsletter and we couldn’t be more excited. 🤩

We are first-hand witnesses of an AI revolution and with last week’s release from OpenAI’s cooking kitchen, the stakes just got higher.

This is what you need to have on your radar this week:

• Deep dive: Part I of our Building your startup upon sound legal grounds is out

• Public scrutiny towards OpenAI is increasing with its former co-founder leaving and senior researchers resigning from the company

• The impact of AI towards business building will be huge with the first unicorns being created by a one-person team soon

• It is important to have a stock of free media assets at your disposal - we share the best websites

👉 For more content, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram

The Gradient’s deep dive

Legal topics can be a make or break.

They become very relevant from early on, yet many do not want to deal with them. Early mistakes can compound into major risks in the long run, though.

In our Part I of our Building your startup upon sound legal grounds deep dive, we cover the most important legal documents to set up when founding.

A world of Memes

Your talk track for this week’s cocktail party

OpenAI faces a wave of internal problems:

👉 OpenAI’s former Chief Scientist and co-founder Ilya Sutskever has officially left the company as of last week

Sutskever had played a key role during the failed attempt of the OpenAI Board to oust CEO Sam Altman earlier this year. Not many facts have surfaced from the inside about his opinions on the departure, but rumours about an internal power struggle about AI safety have been abundant.

Read Sutskever’s own statement here.

👉 OpenAI’s Superalignment team has been disbanded after two senior figures quit

The research team responsible to work on ways to ensure the safe deployment of AI has been let go, or moved to other departments. This comes after two senior figures of the team have quit last week.

AI safety has emerged as a top issue of concern across the globe, as some experts reckon so-called AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is less than 5 years away.

👉 Scarlet Johansson accuses OpenAI to use a voice too similar to her own in the latest product GPT-4o

The voice of the AI you can talk with - the key feature of OpenAI’s GPT-4o - sounds weirdly similar to that of Scarlet Johansson. A coincident? The actor is famous for her voice in “Her”, a dystopian movie where the main actor falls in love with an AI companion.

As it happens, OpenAI seems to have approached Johansson for lending her voice and she rejected. Now, she is preparing for battle.

Read the full statement of Scarlet Johansson here.

This week’s survey

Food for thought

💡Startups leveraging LLM-based Technology continue to emerge in rocketship-like speed. Yet, how many of them are building solutions which will actually be needed and can leverage a unique moat?

💡The impact of AI on building a startup will be huge:

Performance marketing, content marketing, outbounds, support, admin stuff - all this will be able to delegate to an AI in the future.

👉 We are entering an era which will see the first unicorns being built by one person alone

💡 Taking money from VCs or bootstrapping is a philosophical decision where emotions fly high for many Entrepreneurs. There is no right or wrong, mostly it is a decision on how you personally want to build a business. We found an interesting piece on the incentive structure of many VCs - to know the rules of the game is certainly helpful…

Click below to read the full piece 👇

Smart hack

Even in times of AI, it is hard to sometimes get the right photos and videos just as you want them.

We found this interesting piece online about 6 useful sites that have free stocks of photos and videos, all free of copyright.

👉 Check out the full list here

Mark your calendar

In need for some inspiration for your upcoming pitch or demo day?

What helped us in the past to fine-tune our presentation skills is watching other peers how they aced (sometimes you learned more about it when they didn’t) their pitches. START Global, one of Europe's startup conference and its START Fellowship for African and South American startup cohort hold their online Demo Day this Thursday, May 23rd from 4-5pm CET.

👉 You can sign up here

Talk to you next week!

In the meantime, we see you on LinkedIn, Youtube and Insta!

🫶 Melanie & Christian from Follow the Gradient

Wanna talk to us? Shoot us an email under [email protected]