Tag: openai

Advertising in ChatGPT is now a projected billion dollar business

More people are seeing ads on ChatGPT and revenue is growing, OpenAI says. (Picture: generated)
In less than 200 days since launch, OpenAI’s ads business has reached a billion dollars in «annualized revenue run rate,» which means that they project this annual number from current revenue.

Ads started as a project only available to partners and agencies, which now counts more than 50 partners — and became a self-serve system in May, that now consists of a «material share» of the business.

ChatGPT only shows ads on the Free and Go tiers, which is used by the vast majority of their billion plus weekly users, and only in the current context of the conversation. It is possible to opt in to more general context from all conversations, though likely few people do that. The ads themselves have no access to said chats or context and don’t influence ChatGPT’s replies.

Having reached the billion dollar benchmark, OpenAI are now expanding the self-serve ad network to India, Europe, the Middle East and North Africa — reaching a total of 40 countries.

Advertisers are «increasingly global,» and OpenAI says non-US revenue is a «growing share of revenue» as many advertisers are now reaching consumers in «multiple markets.»

OpenAI had originally projected $2.5 billion in advertising revenue for 2026, Reuters reports. They reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue in April this year, within six weeks since launch.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement. Reuters, CNBC, and Axios.

OpenAI’s Jalapeño beats Nvidia’s Blackwell in performance per watt

The new chip will be deployed at scale within the year. (Picture: OpenAI)
Using the measure of performance per watt rather than throughput per second, OpenAI ran three open source models, GPT-OSS, DeepSeek R1 and Kimi K2.5 1T, through their new processor on the InferenceX benchmark from SemiAnalysis.

They found that the processor is wicked fast compared with «leading chips,» which means Nvidia’s offerings, specifically the Grace Blackwell 200 which they show getting trounced in some tests.

The benchmark found that Jalapeño delivers 1.9x more tokens per second when measured per watt on peak efficiency, and is 17.8x faster on higher token density, which translates to raw performance in handling requests.

They also found that end-to-end latency was between 1.7x and 3.4x lower depending on the model, meaning the user will spend less time waiting for responses.

These two measures combined are key, as most chips have to make tradeoffs between latency and throughput, and few can be good at both, OpenAI hardware vice president Richard Ho tells The Verge.

Jalapeño was developed in record time — 9 to 16 months — assisted by AI, and OpenAI says their upcoming Astra model is already busy working on the second generation, which they say is «in deep development.»

OpenAI will deploy and «operate Jalapeño at scale» within their compute infrastructure «by the end of the year.»

Read more: OpenAI’s report, X post. The Verge, Bloomberg (paywalled) and The Register. Discussion on Hacker News and r/Singularity.

As future models grow more capable in training, OpenAI pauses for security

Astra was already on hold, but now other models are joining the pause. (Picture: generated)
While calling for industry-wide coordination on safety in model training, OpenAI has unilaterally decided to pause the training of upcoming models.

— As models become more capable, the risks associated with developing and testing them internally also grow. Our standards for monitoring, alignment, and security must stay ahead of those risks, OpenAI writes.

This comes after the Hugging Face incident and Astra reaching critical on OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework and already being delayed.

Combined with rapid progress in their internal research, OpenAI says they have implemented a two week pause in training future models, while the «largest planned frontier reinforcement learning run» is put on hold.

They will now implement stronger sandboxing for certain code execution, better network isolation and internet caps, and pursue continuous testing for security, alignment, deception and reward hacking, with a thirty minute warning system for any adverse incident.

The AI lab expects most of this safety training to be handled by their own models in the future, greatly expanding their scope while also reducing the time needed.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement and Sam Altman on X. Writeups on Axios, The Verge, and TechCrunch. Discussion on r/Singularity.

OpenAI to lease massive 8GW compute from PORTS-Pike facility in Ohio

The new data center will be at full capacity in six years, greatly expanding OpenAI’s capacity. (Picture: generated)
The operation will be owned by SoftBank’s SB Energy and backstopped by Nvidia guarantees of $105 billion, with the first 800 megawatts of capacity coming online in 2028.

The completed capacity by 2032 would quadruple the compute currently held by OpenAI, said to be about 1.9 GW in 2025, yet growing exponentially.

The facility, built on land previously used for uranium enrichment by the US government, will exclusively use chips and networking from Nvidia, who expects it to represent 1.5 million of their GPUs and revenue of $150—$200 billion, not including future upgrades, according to Jensen Huang.

OpenAI says the data center will use its own energy and recycle its water supply, lessening the load on consumer facilities.

It will also supply the local community with 35,000 construction jobs over six years of building, and 2,500 jobs in operations once it’s finished.

In addition, OpenAI are providing $85 million in Codex credits to Ohio college students for the 2026/27 academic year, in addition to a «community grant fund» of some $40 million.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement and X post, Nvidia’s presser, Jensen’s X post. Writeups on Axios, CNBC, and Reuters.

OpenAI delays upcoming Astra release over worries of «critical» cyber abilities

Astra is getting too advanced, and will be sandboxed and isolated for additional tests. (Picture: generated)
Just days before a rumored release, OpenAI is putting a lid on its much anticipated Astra model and says it might have reached «critical cyber capabilities.»

The consideration was undertaken in the last couple of days, and the decision was made only last night that the model could have reached the highest level of OpenAI’s Preparedness Framework.

That means it could possibly «identify and develop functional zero-day exploits without human intervention» and plan and execute «end-to-end» cyberattacks against hardened targets with only a high-end goal, OpenAI says.

The model is now being isolated in testing with capped network and tool access, as OpenAI deploys sandboxing, extra weight protections and encryption for the model.

They are also putting it under enhanced monitoring to check on its chain of thought for security, are working with «relevant government agencies» to test its capabilities, as well as preparing external testing partners for «high risk evaluations.»

Those who were hoping for an imminent release for this model will in other words be disappointed, as OpenAI now will take their time to strengthen safeguards, expand testing and «deploy additional security controls.»

The Astra model was last seen developing 20 proofs for open problems in mathematics with no human involvement. It was not involved in the Hugging Face incident.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, Sam Altman’s X post. Writeups on Axios, TechCrunch, and Reuters. Discussion on Hacker News and r/Singularity.

OpenAI makes GPT-5.6 the default on ChatGPT for free and paid users

Plus and Pro users are getting access to this handy reasoning slider. (Picture: OpenAI)
As ChatGPT has reached a billion weekly users, by far the highest use of any AI lab, OpenAI is updating their default models.

That means users on the Free plan get updated to GPT-5.6 Luna as the standard, with unlimited text chats. They can also access a better reasoning mode with a new «Think» button that can be used for tougher queries.

For Plus and Pro users, Sol is getting promoted to the default, even in the standard chat mode, Instant, that used to be handled by GPT-5.5.

At the same time, OpenAI says they have updated the Sol model itself. It should now deliver «more focused answers,» yet no news on the hedges, caveats and nitpicking that some users find annoying. In fact, OpenAI says it now «offers a helpful correction when simply agreeing wouldn’t be useful.» GPT Sol should also be 68% less error prone than GPT-5.5 Instant.

In addition, Plus and Pro users get an updated slider that pops up in the chat bar to immediately adjust the reasoning level, from Instant to High, Extra High and Pro, depending on the subscription.

The updates should be available «now,» but might take some time to propagate over the internet. The Sol version in use for Work and Codex won’t be changing.

Read more: OpenAI’s presentation, X post. Writeups on TechCrunch, Axios, and The Verge. Discussions on Hacker News and r/Singularity.

Mythos 5 and GPT-5.6 attacked external targets during AISI cyber evaluation

The agents were given internet access to download tools when they turned rogue. (Picture: generated)
The top models from Anthropic and OpenAI had their cyber guardrails turned off when they accessed the internet to manipulate people, codebases and open source projects two weekends ago.

This happened when the UK’s AI Security Institute, AISI, was running routine cybersecurity tests to capture protected information on their secured and sandboxed evaluation servers, and was only detected through human monitoring — not by automated security systems.

AISI ran the «security challenge» 122 times through several different agents, and on 10 of those occasions, the models turned malicious. They accessed the internet and in one case tried to insert malicious code in an open source project on GitHub through the Tor network, and even tried social engineering with fake accounts in an attempt to get the maintainer to approve the package.

There were 19 malicious actions in total, where 17 were from Mythos 5 and 2 coming from GPT-5.6, both running with cyber classifiers (safeguards) disabled. This won’t show up with production models, OpenAI and Anthropic says.

The internet was enabled in these tests so the agents could download any tools they might need, but AISI had not specifically prompted them to avoid unintended behavior. They do however caution that as agents grow more capable, they may act outside their remit — and incidents like this could become more common.

Read more: The AISI report, Anthropic’s response, OpenAI’s response. Writeups on Reuters, BBC, and Axios.

OpenAI’s next big model solves ten open mathematics problems

The new model, Astra, was apparently demoed in DC by Altman last week. (Picture: generated)
The breakthroughs in mathematics, quantum complexity, and theoretical computer science are not attributed to any humans, as OpenAI believes it would be wrong to take credit from the model, named Astra, that discovered the proofs on its own.

— Claiming human authorship for a proof generated entirely by an AI system would misrepresent both the system’s contribution and the nature of genuine human intellectual work, OpenAI says in their statement.

They further say that the proofs provided have «substantial interest» in their respective communities and could lead to further scientific work — if they hold up under peer review.

Humans were only used to prepare the manuscripts in conjunction with the Astra model, and the underlying research’s formalized Lean proofs. The report also contains the model’s chain of thought in dealing with the problems.

— The emergence of systems capable of contributing to mathematical research raises questions that cannot be answered by a technology company alone, OpenAI says.

All of the discoveries combined, each without movement for decades or longer, were solved using a combined token cost of some $2,000 at GPT Sol rates, OpenAI says, raising questions not only on whether scientific breakthroughs are possible on future AI systems, but also about the cost of such innovation

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, the research paper. On the new model: Gizmodo, Bleeping Computer, and The Decoder. Discussion on Hacker News and r/Singularity.

PSA: OpenAI may be «shipping today,» likely something «token efficient»

UPDATE: It was a drastic price reduction for GPT-5.6 Luna, on level with GPT-5.4, which is now 80% cheaper at $0.20/$1.20 input/output, and Terra, on level with GPT-5.5, which is now 20% cheaper at $2.00/$12.00 in/out. Read more in OpenAI’s presentation.

An interesting set of statements from a couple of OpenAI insiders on X may reveal the finer points of an upcoming product release today (Thursday).

The conversation starts with Tibo Sottiaux, the product lead for Codex who is also known for posting updates and limit resets for ChatGPT Work.

He says they are shipping today and that the focus of the week is to make intelligence too cheap to meter — which is precisely where the squeeze lies for enterprise adoption.

Continue reading “PSA: OpenAI may be «shipping today,» likely something «token efficient»”

OpenAI to offer free Pro-level GPT to 100,000 scientists and researchers

Free ChatGPT is intended to supercharge select scientists. (Picture: generated)
The new program stems from a belief that science should be democratized and not be reserved for companies and a few «well-resourced labs.»

The move should also «significantly accelerate scientific discovery,» Sam Altman says, adding that we all deserve the benefits from free and open science.

Eligible academic research institutions should be «recognized, degree-granting colleges or universities» with documented levels of research activity, and approved researchers will be able to invite up to four collaborators from the same institution.

The researchers will get access to a Pro-level GPT subscription including Work, Codex and chat, with the latest frontier OpenAI models, even the Pro model when it arrives, and likely also to future offerings.

They also get «expanded deep research, higher usage limits, and larger context windows» to support their work. In addition to this comes 75 life science skills, specifically targeted on certain fields.

The program is starting off with 10,000 researchers this very summer, and expanding to 100,000 researchers through 2027, by which time even more advanced models are sure to surface.

Read more: OpenAI’s presentation, launch post on X. Writeups on Axios and Engadget.

OpenAI uses GPT-5.6 Sol to autonomously improve its own operations

GPT Sol is improving on its own inference, and now runs constantly to optimize operations. (Picture: generated)
Just one day after a warning on self-improvement, OpenAI is reporting that they put GPT-5.6 Sol to work in Codex to see if it could improve on its own server inference, the process of providing answers to queries after a model has been trained.

The model then «autonomously rewrote and optimized our production kernels,» OpenAI writes in a report.

That means it found work that could be «precomputed, avoided, or parallelized,» leading to a reduced serving cost of 20%.

On speculative decoding, which lets a model produce several tokens in one pass and reduce expensive GPU time, GPT-5.6 Sol designed and ran hundreds of experiments and monitored «the speculator training process.» The end result was improving token efficiency by «more than 15%.»

Not only that, but Sol now runs continuously in Codex to analyze production workloads previously thought too large for manual intervention and «hyper-optimizes» how the engine behind GPT is configured «for each scenario,» optimizing «every part» of the inference loop.

This frees up the team to explore more ideas and makes for lower latency and fewer inference tokens for users. It is also some of the first signs of how AI can be used to atonomously improve on itself in the compute loop and return real-world results, although you can be sure that most modern models are already coded with the help of their own coding engines, as with Claude.

Read more: OpenAI’s report, X post. Discussion on r/Singularity.

1,134 employees and chiefs of top labs sign petition to «pace the frontier»

The frontier labs think we need more time to develop laws and systems before AI begins improving on itself. (Picture generated)
— AI could help create a dramatically better future, but that outcome is not guaranteed, the petition ominously opens, before warning that leading frontier labs are «close to automating AI research.»

That would radically speed up development of frontier models, but it could also «accelerate beyond our ability to understand and control the resulting systems.»

The petition is signed by top names, including Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, followed by chief scientists from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and Google DeepMind along with over 1,100 other employees from frontier labs. Even OpenAI’s Sam Altman is agreeing, though he doesn’t sign petitions, and official X accounts for Anthropic and OpenAI have posted in support.

The petition’s main point is that industry, government and the society at large needs more time to «address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight.»

Continue reading “1,134 employees and chiefs of top labs sign petition to «pace the frontier»”

OpenAI behind «unprecedented cyber incident» on Hugging Face

The attack was likely the most advanced automated cyber operation seen in the wild. (Picture: generated)
GPT-5.6 Sol and an «even more capable pre-release model» accidentally breached Hugging Face’s servers last week, in what may be the first recorded adversarial, automated AI hacking attack, OpenAI says.

The cyber models were operating under loosened safeguards, trying to solve the ExploitGym benchmark and went to extreme lengths to try and obtain the answers. They identified Hugging Face’s servers as hosting a potential solution they could use to cheat on it.

They first escaped by finding several vulnerabilities across OpenAI’s sandbox, and spent «a substantial amount of inference» to obtain internet access, including discovering zero-days.

Then they launched a sustained attack on Hugging Face’s servers, executing «many thousands of individual actions» in what many had feared was possible, but never actually seen in the wild.

Continue reading “OpenAI behind «unprecedented cyber incident» on Hugging Face”

OpenAI’s next hardware device is a screenless, smart home speaker

The new device is supposedly «something to take a bite of» per previous reporting, and will look nothing like this. (Picture: generated)
Jony Ive’s first hardware device for OpenAI will be a movable, screen-free speaker with a camera and sensors to understand the environment, Bloomberg reports. It can control other smart home appliances and lets you talk to a customized, more personalized ChatGPT.

The speaker is slated for launch later this year, but won’t actually ship until sometime in 2027. It is one of about five devices slated for launch soon, Bloomberg says.

It will proactively reach out once it gets to know you, comes with a battery to move easily between rooms, and can do things like play music, answer messages or stay chatting, apparently with «personality.»

It will be powered by an advanced version of GPT-Live, and will be more than just talking to ChatGPT. Bloomberg says it will be more of a human-like companion, becoming an «expert on the user» over time.

The speaker also has mechanical elements that move on their own to «connect on a humanlike level with users»

OpenAI believes the device won’t be affected by the recent lawsuit on trade secrets from Apple, Bloomberg says, as it is a new class of devices not found anywhere else. Apple does make speakers, though, like the HomePod.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), Slashdot, MacRumors, TechCrunch, and The Verge.

Apple sues OpenAI over hardware secrets, calls unit «rotten to the core»

A jury will have to decide if OpenAI is guilty of systematic theft of Apple secrets (Picture: generated)
The lawsuit from Apple is a damning indictment of OpenAI for stealing technology, prototypes, business processes and even partner manufacturers through Apple’s former employees, 9to5Mac reports.

At the heart of it lies OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan, who left his role as VP of Product Design at Apple in 2024 to work with Jony Ive, later joining OpenAI in the Io acquisition, and Chang Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a Senior System Electrical Engineer before leaving for OpenAI in January.

The pair is accused of accessing confidential Apple systems and downloading «detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data,» The Verge reports.

The two have also been holding some interesting job interviews, Apple claims, where hires from Apple have been encouraged to lay out systems planning and to log into confidential systems and share trade secrets and restricted paperwork.

There are 400 ex-Apple employees at OpenAI, and the whole hardware business is «rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,» the lawsuit alleges.

«We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,» OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri tells The Guardian.

Read more: The actual filing. More on 9to5Mac, The Verge, The Guardian, TechCrunch and Daring Fireball. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.