The OpenAI thread

[Free]

There tends to be so many news bits focused on OpenAI as a company/business interest/destroyer of worlds, I thought it might benefit us to have a topic thread we can dump all those into.

First up, a temporary closing of OpenAI... (which may be in a weird response to Meta's staff poaching efforts)

OpenAI Is Shutting Down for a Week

In a bid to retain its staffers amid a Meta poaching spree, OpenAI is giving them a mandatory week-long vacation.

futurism.com

In a bid to retain its staffers amid a Meta poaching spree, OpenAI is giving them a mandatory week-long vacation.

According to insiders who spoke to Wired, a cloud of anxiety is lingering over OpenAI's C-suite as leaders scramble to keep staff happy and on their side — a tall order given that employees there often work up to 80 hours a week.

Over the past week, Meta has hired at least eight OpenAI researchers to work on its new "superintelligence" team. This "recruiting coup," as the Wall Street Journal called it when breaking news about the hires, is meant to lead the company out of the hole created by founder Mark Zuckerberg's shifting interests and investments — but it seems to have caused a secondary crisis at OpenAI in the process.

 

[Free]

Money, money, money
Must be funny
In the rich man's world

OpenAI May Be in Major Trouble Financially

Recent indicators in the AI industry point to a growing crisis of profitability, with OpenAI caught right in the middle.

futurism.com

Since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world two and a half years ago, the company has operated at a substantial financial loss.

Despite raising at least $60.9 billion in private funding since ChatGPT's public launch, OpenAI is leaking billions of dollars every year. In 2024, for example, the tech startup lost some $5 billion, per MSNBC. That doesn't seem to bother OpenAI insiders, though, who hope to be bringing in $125 billion in annual revenue by 2029.

The gulf between OpenAI's ambitions and its actual financial health reflect what tech critic Ed Zitron calls the "subprime AI crisis."

 

[Free]

An Engineer's Diary Reveals the Human Cost of Building OpenAI's Next Big Thing

With a newborn at home, a former top engineer details the grueling, 7-week sprint that pushed a small team to its absolute limit to ship a world-changing product.

gizmodo.com

Behind the seemingly magical abilities of OpenAI’s technology lies a story of intense human effort and immense personal sacrifice. In a candid reflection posted on July 15, former top engineer Calvin French-Owen peeled back the curtain on the company’s high stakes culture. He detailed a product launch that was “unquestionably one of the highlights of my career” but also the “hardest I’ve worked in nearly a decade.”

French-Owen is a seasoned tech leader who cofounded the successful data company Segment, according to his profile on LinkedIn. He was not a wide eyed junior developer; he was a veteran who understood the demands of the industry. Yet even he was struck by the intensity of the sprint to build and launch Codex, an ambitious AI agent designed to write and edit software, after joining OpenAI in May 2024.

The project went from the first line of code to a full public launch in a breathtaking seven weeks.

Not sounding like a healthy, normal tech company.

 

[Free]

OpenAI’s new CEO of Applications is all about democratizing AI, getting it in the hands of everybody (I'm sure at a hefty price tag), blah blah blah, etc.

OpenAI's New Exec Has a Grand Plan to Make AI for Everyone

Fidji Simo, the former Instacart CEO, is betting she can turn AI from a luxury into a utility that closes the gap between the haves and have-nots.

gizmodo.com

 

[Free]

Hoo-rah.

OpenAI Finally Lives Up to Its Name, Drops Two New Open Source AI Models

The AI company is looking to get back in the business of transparency.

gizmodo.com

For the first time in five years, OpenAI has released two new free and open-source AI models that are lightweight and designed to be easily integrated into other software programs.

In a blog post on Tuesday, the company characterized gpt-oss-120b and gpt-oss-20b as flexible but powerful AI algorithms that can perform a variety of tasks and be used in numerous settings. The company also included a feedback portal and a more extensive blog that further explains the models and how they work. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said via X on Tuesday that he hoped that the AI would assist with “new kinds of research and the creation of new kinds of products.” Altman also seemed to champion the open source method: “We believe in individual empowerment,” he said. “Although we believe most people will want to use a convenient service like ChatGPT, people should be able to directly control and modify their own AI when they need to, and the privacy benefits are obvious.”

Unlike most of ChatGPT’s products, open-source models disclose the training parameters that were used to build their system. This level of transparency affords onlookers the benefit of knowing how the system functions and why it might behave in the ways that it does. The last time OpenAI released an open-source model was during Trump’s first presidency (truly, that feels like decades ago), with the release of GPT-2.

 

[Free]

Hmm.

OpenAI Is Poised to Become the Most Valuable Startup Ever. Should It Be?

OpenAI is reportedly on the verge of a roughly $500 billion valuation, a figure that would make it the most valuable private company in the world—bigger than SpaceX, TikTok’s parent company Bytedance, and even public giants like Palantir. It’s a staggering number for a company with an “astronomical burn rate.” How is this even possible?

As Axios reports, there are actually two deals in play: a SoftBank-led round valuing the company at $300 billion, which won’t close until year’s end, and a secondary sale of employee shares at a far steeper $500 billion valuation. Most of the cheaper shares have already been snapped up, leaving investors to fight over the pricier ones.

One OpenAI investor—who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing an NDA—compared it to the dawn of the internet. “We're in one of the biggest technology shifts [in history],” the investor tells me. “The outcomes continue to get bigger than people think.”

Oh?

The investor argues that the math for investing at the $500 billion valuation is straightforward: Hypothetically, if ChatGPT hits 2 billion users and monetizes at $5 per user per month—“half the rate of things like Google or Facebook”—that’s $120 billion in annual revenue.

So all OpenAI needs to accomplish this is for ChatGPT to hit 2 BILLION USERS. Got it...

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The $500 billion dollar megacorporation that still insists on calling itself a "startup"

 

[Noodles]

Hmm.

OpenAI Is Poised to Become the Most Valuable Startup Ever. Should It Be?


Oh?



So all OpenAI needs to accomplish this is for ChatGPT to hit 2 BILLION USERS. Got it...

An article I found says that in December they were at [strike]~~3 Billion~~[/strike] 300 Million users.

How the heck do you strike on this thing...

Leys be generous and assume they are now at 500 million users.

So they just need to quadruple their user base, AND get ALL of them to pay monthly.

EZ. Duuuuuh.

What a joke.

 

[Free]

An article I found says that in December they were at 3 Billion users.

PAYING users. I'm doubting the 3 billion are spending a lot of money on it.

 

[Casey Pelous]

I dunno -- if we accept the latest updated world population figure of 8 billion, all they have to do is get one out of every four people on the face of the Earth to ....

oh.....

 

[Noodles]

PAYING users. I'm doubting the 3 billion are spending a lot of money on it.

I got my numbers written ng, 300 million users.

 

[Noodles]

Ok, ChatGPT is pretty good at making twisted smutty stories.

 

[Free]

This sounds...way overdue.

OpenAI announces parental controls for ChatGPT after teen suicide lawsuit

Promised protections follow reports of vulnerable users misled in extended chats.

arstechnica.com

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced plans to roll out parental controls for ChatGPT and route sensitive mental health conversations to its simulated reasoning models, following what the company has called "heartbreaking cases" of users experiencing crises while using the AI assistant. The moves come after multiple reported incidents where ChatGPT allegedly failed to intervene appropriately when users expressed suicidal thoughts or experienced mental health episodes.

"This work has already been underway, but we want to proactively preview our plans for the next 120 days, so you won’t need to wait for launches to see where we’re headed," OpenAI wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "The work will continue well beyond this period of time, but we’re making a focused effort to launch as many of these improvements as possible this year."

Oh, so they're still beta testing on people. Great...

 

[Free]

Looks like we've got a new conspiracy theory going on.

OpenAI thinks its critics are funded by billionaires. Now it’s going after them

The multibillion-dollar AI giant thinks it's critics are part of a billionaire conspiracy. We examined the evidence

sfstandard.com

 

[Free]

Oh joy.

OpenAI Says It's Making a Full Hollywood Movie Using AI

OpenAI has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles to create a feature-length animated movie made with AI.

futurism.com

OpenAI has teamed up with production companies in London and Los Angeles to create a feature-length animated movie made largely with artificial intelligence.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, the purported goal of using AI tech on the movie is to speed up production while also saving costs — and, presumably, serving as a giant tech demo for movie execs everywhere.

The film, dubbed "Critterz," is reportedly about forest creatures going on an adventure, and was first dreamed up by OpenAI creative specialist Chad Nelson three years ago.

Maybe I'll see it after they release the 4o version of it.

 

[Free]

OpenAI's new Sora video generator to require copyright holders to opt out, WSJ reports

 

[Free]

The First 24 Hours of Sora 2 Chaos: Copyright Violations, Sam Altman Shoplifting, and More

We're all screwed, aren't we?

gizmodo.com

On Tuesday, OpenAI released Sora 2, the latest version of its video and audio generation tool that it promised would be the “most powerful imagination engine ever built.” Less than a day into its release, it appears the imaginations of most people are dominated by copyrighted material and existing intellectual property.

In tandem with the release of its newest model, OpenAI also dropped a Sora app, designed for users to generate and share content with each other. While the app is currently invite-only, even if you just want to see the content, plenty of videos have already made their way to other social platforms. The videos that have taken off outside of OpenAI’s walled garden contain lots of familiar characters: Sonic the Hedgehog, Solid Snake, Pikachu.

 

[Noodles]

OpenAI's new Sora video generator to require copyright holders to opt out, WSJ reports

I don't think that is how that works.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I don't think that is how that works.

Tech bros are above the law! ...I can't even laugh, because it's true.

 

[Free]

I don't think that is how that's supposed to work.

fify...