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.
CEO Sam Altman posted that the company is planning to “release a powerful new open-weight language model with reasoning in the coming months.” The team has been long hinting at this release: In a Reddit AMA two months ago, Altman said the company was “discussing” an open weight model and that OpenAI has “been on the wrong side of history here.” There’s also, uh, the DeepSeek of it all.
Last week, OpenAI released Images for ChatGPT which led to an explosion of interest thanks to its ability, in part, to generate Studio Ghibli inspired AI art. It looks like the virality has paid off — CEO Sam Altman posted that the company has added one million users in the last hour alone (he’s also been begging users to stop generating images: “our GPUs are melting”).
I listen to a lot of podcasts as an AI reporter since these CEOs seem to really love a hot mic and a sympathetic ear. I just listened to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s interview with Stratechery’s Ben Thompson and found it especially illuminating — he hints at de-hyping AGI, how SOTA models are less important than the “1-billion daily active user destination site,” and more.
“Well, this was AI for many, many years. AI was always what we couldn’t do. As soon as we could do it, it’s machine learning. And as soon as you didn’t notice it, it was an algorithm,” Ben Thompson said.
The ChatGPT-maker expects to earn $12.7 billion in revenue this year, Bloomberg reported, which would be a massive jump from the $3.7 billion in annual revenue it raked in last year (The New York Times previously reported that OpenAI expected to earn $11.6 billion this year). It also expects to bring in $29.4 billion in revenue next year. This new revenue projection comes just months after the startup launched a $200 a month tier.
The Body Scout author Lincoln Michel has a thoughtful literary analysis of Sam Altman’s AI-written “metafictional literary short story” — which, like a lot of AI text, scans well without exactly adding up:
“I haven’t actually seen anyone praise the story as a story. No one is lauding the memorable characters or marveling at the vivid setting. Instead, the praise has focused on “good lines.” The purple prose. And the prose is the worst part.”
[countercraft.substack.com]
We were promised multimodal, natural language, AI-powered everything. We got nothing of the sort.
This report from The Information says that OpenAI investors have been told the company plans to charge as much as $20k monthly for PhD-level research agents at the high end. Lower tiers could cost $2,000 or $10,000 per month, which certainly helps its $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro subscription look cheap by comparison.
That projection explains why AI companies are selling agents as a future worth paying for -- assuming they can find anyone other than Softbank to pick up the tab.
[theinformation.com]
The Competition and Markets Authority has ruled that the relationship between the two companies “does not qualify for investigation” under merger rules. The CMA said in 2023 that it was assessing whether Microsoft’s $13 billion investment into the AI startup gave it de facto control over OpenAI policy.
While now satisfied that it doesn’t, the CMA says that Microsoft “instead exerts a high level of material influence over that policy.”
District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has denied Musk’s request for an injunction to pause the ChatGPT maker’s transition to a for-profit company. The case is now set for an expedited trial this fall given “the public interest at stake.”
This comes after OpenAI unanimously rejected Musk’s unsolicited $97.4 billion offer to buy the AI startup. In February Rogers said she was unlikely to issue an injunction in a case pitting “billionaires versus billionaires.”
[bloomberg.com]
The AI video generator can only be accessed by users who are subscribed to ChatGPT’s Plus ($20/£20 per month) or Pro ($200/£200 per month) tiers. Sora being rolled out to the UK comes as creatives in the country are fighting against government plans to embrace generative AI by weakening copyright protections.
We knew OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 launch was imminent, and now it has cheekily revealed a live stream is due at 3PM ET today. “Livestream in 4.5 hours,” said OpenAI in a post on X, seemingly confirming references to GPT-4.5 that have been spotted on ChatGPT this week.
I reported last week that OpenAI was targeting a release of GPT-4.5 by the end of February, and it looks like it’s about to happen. Reddit posters have discovered references to GPT-4.5, codenamed Orion, in the Android version of ChatGPT. I’ve also heard from one source familiar with OpenAI’s plans that the GPT-4.5 launch should be going ahead today.
[reddit.com]
Inside this chatbot is an assistant that can remember and do stuff for you. Sometimes.
This free version will be powered by GPT-4o mini instead of GPT-4o. “The natural conversation pace and tone are similar to the GPT-4o version while being more cost effective to serve,” OpenAI says on X.
That means subscribers to OpenAI’s $20 per month tier can try it instead of having to cough up for the $200 per month Pro tier. The feature is rolling out to Team, Edu, and Enterprise users, too, OpenAI says.
OpenAI is expanding access to its new Operator AI agent to more markets today, including the UK, Canada, and India. Announced last month, Operator can perform tasks on the web for you, and requires a $200 monthly ChatGPT Pro subscription. Microsoft is also working on its own version of OpenAI’s Operator.
Though it might have seemed like OpenAI was on the ropes between its recent weirdness with Microsoft and the disruptive arrival of DeepSeek, CNBC reports that the firm behind ChatGPT now has 400 million weekly active users — up 100 million from last December. OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap attributed the 33% growth to, among other things, word of mouth:
”They see the utility of it. They see their friends using it. “There’s an overall effect of people really wanting these tools, and seeing that these tools are really valuable.”
