Hard Numbers: Harvard’s books, A whistleblower’s tragic end, Broadcom’s boom, Getting brainworms

​The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library is pictured in Harvard yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., December 7, 2023
The Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library is pictured in Harvard yard at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, U.S., December 7, 2023
REUTERS/Faith Ninivaggi

1 million: Harvard Law School's Library Innovation Lab has launched the Institutional Data Initiative to make public domain data from Harvard and other institutions available for training AI models, including 1 million books scanned at Harvard.

26: A former OpenAI researcher-turned-whistleblower named Suchir Balaji was found dead in his apartment from an appartent suicide. Balaji, who was only 26, left OpenAI earlier this year and went public with concerns that the company had violated US copyright laws in training ChatGPT.

1 trillion: The chipmaker Broadcom is now a $1 trillion company after its stock surged 20% on Dec. 13 following positive news about its AI business. The company told investors in its quarterly earnings call that its AI chip business was rapidly growing, as a result boosting Broadcom to the ninth-most-valuable company in the world.

250 million: The startup Liquid AI is closing in on a new $250 million fundraising round that would value it at $2.3 billion. Fascinatingly, the company is building “liquid foundation models” that, instead of being modeled off of neural connections in the human brain, are based off of the inner workings of worm brains.

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