OpenAI kicked off an AI revolution with DALL-E and ChatGPT, making the organization the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI became a story unto itself when Altman was briefly fired and then brought back after pressure from staff and Microsoft, an investor and close partner.
Anthropic’s private cybersecurity-focused model is being used by a handful of large companies, including Nvidia, Apple, and JPMorgan Chase, to plug high-stakes vulnerabilities in their systems, creating a lot of buzz. On the podcast, I unpacked the model, the competition, and the stakes.
Codex can now use your macOS apps on its own.
The head of OpenAI has a reputation for deception. The New Yorker’s Ronan Farrow on why that matters.
“The market is as competitive as I have ever seen it,” wrote Denise Dresser, OpenAI’s chief revenue officer.
OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are eating the software world alive.
When hackers got access to an account belonging to the maintainer of Axios, they inserted a script that granted remote access to users’ Windows, macOS, and Linux devices. This malicious version potentially compromised ChatGPT’s macOS apps, so OpenAI is issuing an update and new certificates to mitigate any risks.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman published a post on his personal blog addressing today’s situation where a person allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at his house and an “incendiary article about me a few days ago,” which I am guessing refers to the big New Yorker article.
The post includes his beliefs about AI, some personal reflections on OpenAI’s work, and “some thoughts about the industry,” including how no one company should control AGI.
[Sam Altman]
It’s a make-or-break year for Anthropic and OpenAI, which are facing more pressure than ever to make more cash than they burn.
Tubi just announced that it has launched its own app inside ChatGPT:
Users can add Tubi’s app from ChatGPT app store and type “@Tubi” anytime to describe what they’re in the mood for, whether that’s “a movie that feels like a fever dream but isn’t horror” or “a thriller for tonight.” They’ll then receive curated, interactive results that they can watch on Tubi.
The blueprint — created with the help of NCMEC and the Attorney General Alliance — is aimed at “modernizing laws” to address AI-generated CSAM, improving the reporting process, and building systems that interrupt exploitation attempts.
OpenAI is juggling public controversies, strategy shifts, and increasing competition.
As Iran threatens to destroy OpenAI’s Stargate data center in Abu Dhabi, just think of all the extra admin it’s created for the people in charge of construction.
miakizz:
barring anything else, pour one out for some poor construction project manager who suddenly has to add “site being blown up” to the Asana board
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Kozic will focus on infrastructure at the well-funded startup, which Bezos leads with former Google exec Vikram Bajaj, according to the FT. Project Prometheus is focused on using AI to improve manufacturing. Kozic’s defection is the latest in a broader wave of AI talent reshuffling.
A long, and at times funny, report in The New Yorker on Altman’s will to power, people-pleasing, and alleged pattern of deceit, compiled from notes, memos, and more than 100 interviews. Altman’s reputation has given rise to grimmer rumors – hiring sex workers, the sexual pursuit of minors, even involvement in murder – that The New Yorker found no evidence for. Increasingly, the question is not whether computers are intelligent but whether OpenAI’s leadership is.
[The New Yorker]
But apparently when you write a story about something, sometimes your profile photo comes up in the image search results for it, and a major X account doesn’t bother clicking through to figure that out.
A fascinating profile on litigator Jay Edelson, a longtime tech adversary who’s been filing cases against OpenAI and Google over their LLMs. “Courts are fed up with these companies, and juries are kind of sick of big tech for doing a lot of damage to society,” Edelson says. Sam Altman has called him a “leech tarted up as a freedom fighter,” and Edelson says Altman is “Lex Luthor.”
OpenAI gave up on Sora last week, but in a post about Google’s new “cost efficient” Veo 3.1 Lite AI video model, DeepMind staffer Logan Kilpatrick says that “video’s here to stay.” And in a blog post about the model, the authors discuss Google’s “commitment to making video generation more available to developers.”
OpenAI’s latest round of private investment has closed, with participation from Amazon, Nvidia, Softbank, and Microsoft, as well as $3 billion from individual investors, as it prepares for a potential IPO. This comes after it announced the end of its video generator Sora, and the announcement says it will focus on building a “unified superapp” with ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and other agents all built in.
ChatGPT has 6x the monthly web visits and mobile sessions than the next largest AI app, while total AI time spent is 4x the next largest AI app and 4x all others combined. Search usage has nearly tripled in a year, and our ads pilot reached more than $100 million in ARR in under six weeks.
