Tag: openai

Labs are hiring experts to protect against «catastrophic misuse»

As their models grow more capable, so is the potential for WMD misuse — and AI labs want to be ahead of the curve. (Picture: Adobe)
Anthropic is hiring a weapons expert, the BBC reports.

The role is for someone with long, PhD level experience in «chemical weapons and/or explosives defence,» the LinkedIn post says.

It would be helpful if the person has an «understanding of radiological materials,» the posting goes on, and says the candidate will be «tackling critical problems in preventing catastrophic misuse.»

OpenAI is not far behind in worrying about these issues, and also has a job post open for much the same, but they are looking for someone with machine learning experience from red-teaming in order to safeguard their AI’s responses.

Using any AI for developing these kinds of weapons is of course against all the labs’ terms of use, but as the models grow more capable, they also need more safeguards.

Read more: Anthropic’s job post, OpenAI’s job post, writeups on the BBC and Mashable.

OpenAI plans to combine Codex, ChatGPT and Atlas in «super app»

Feeling that OpenAI has lost focus, attention turns to putting all eggs in one basket. (Picture: generated)
According to The Wall Street Journal, the new app will include agentic capabilities, and signals another step in the company’s recent quest to refocus on coding and business users.

The app will make it easier for teams within OpenAI to work together, the WSJ reports, and will help other users with productivity-related tasks, as they double down on enterprise users.

The standalone ChatGPT app will not be affected by the move, although the paper notes that OpenAI feels it has lost attention by focusing on «side quests» like the Sora app — now rumored to get included in ChatGPT proper.

OpenAI’s Fidji Simo will be leading the super app effort, and she tweets that:

— When new bets start to work, like we’re seeing now with Codex, it’s very important to double down on them and avoid distractions.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal and CNBC.

Codex grows to 2 million weekly users, acquires Python developers Astral

With the popular developers joining, Codex moves in closer on the software stack. (Picture: Shutterstock)
While announcing that Codex had a 3x increase in users and 5x more actual usage this year, and are up to 2 million weekly active users, OpenAI says they are buying Python developer tool company Astral.

Some of the most beloved and, importantly, used Python developer tools come from the company, which will now be supported by OpenAI.

The deal for roughly 32 employees will strengthen Codex by integrating the tools that have «hundreds of millions of downloads per month,» according to Astral themselves.

OpenAI will continue to maintain the open source projects, and by gaining access to them — and the engineers’ knowhow — for Codex’s AI agents, they will be able to work more closely with the tools.

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, Astral’s announcement, and CNBC.

OpenAI upgrades GPT-5.3-instant to be «less clickbait-y» in its responses

“If you want, I can also explain…”-clickbait should largely be gone from the model after the latest update. (Picture: generated)
5.3-instant is the model most people encounter on the Plus and Pro subscriptions on a daily basis. It was supposed to be «less cringe,» and offer «fewer lectures.»

But many had noticed that it had become filled with follow-up questions for simple queries, offering «one strange trick,» «would you like me to tell you three things that…» and «You’ll never believe…»

These teaser-style responses were not just annoying, but sometimes frustrating — as if the bot had become optimized for engagement and tried to keep the conversation going after already answering the query.

The good news is that as of March 16, 2026, OpenAI has upgraded the model to show less of this slop, and users should already be noticing an improvement in «follow-up tone.»

Read more: OpenAI’s update page, Android Headlines.

ChatGPT’s «adult mode» hotly debated at OpenAI, will be smutty, but not porn

There are several roadblocks for Adult Mode, should it ever come to pass. (Picture: generated)
According to The Wall Street Journal, the upcoming «adult mode» for ChatGPT is hitting some internal snags.

Touted by CEO Sam Altman as letting «adults be adults» in October 2025, it was later delayed and then deprioritized last week.

It now seems the company’s internal advisory board is against going forward with the feature, saying it could foster «unhealthy emotional dependence,» Mashable writes.

Also holding back the launch is the fact that ChatGPT’s age checks aren’t that good, and has a rather large error rate of 12% on identifying kids and teens, The Verge reports.

100 million under 18s use ChatGPT every week, which would mean that some 12 million of them could be classified as adults and exposed to «sexualized conversations.»

The feature is currently postponed due to «other priorities,» but is said to skirt images, voice and video for pure text, and will supposedly be «smutty,» not «pornographic,» the Verge says.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Mashable and The Verge.

OpenAI launches GPT-5.4 mini and nano for Free and Go tiers

GPT-5.4-mini comes close to GPT-5.4 on accuracy and cost. (Picture: OpenAI)
Being about two times faster than the previous GPT-5-mini, the models offer solid coding performance for these tiers for the first time.

GPT-5.4-mini can be accessed today by choosing «Thinking» from the model picker on the Free and Pro tiers.

The model is stronger than 5-mini on reasoning, multimodal understanding, tool use and subagents, OpenAI says.

It is also available in Codex, where it uses only 30% of tokens for the same task compared to 5.4 proper — and is usable for workloads where latency and speed are important.

Also introduced today is GPT-5.4-nano, which is for the times when speed and cost matter most. It costs only $0.20/$1.25 per 1M tokens, and is handy for mass classification, ranking, coding subagents and compaction.

Nano doesn’t support web search or computer use, and is only available in the API.

Read more: OpenAI’s introduction, Tibor Blaho on X.com, Engadget.

Encyclopedia Britannica sues OpenAI over copyright and trademarks

The jury is still out on copyright protections for training materials in AI chatbots. (Picture: Britannica)
The revered encyclopedia along with Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries has sued the ChatGPT maker for training on their data and producing «verbatim reproductions» of their content, Reuters reports.

This erodes their copyright, they claim, and «starves publishers of revenue,» because people get their answers directly in ChatGPT rather than getting referred to their websites, TechCrunch writes.

Britannica is also claiming that ChatGPT erodes its trademarks by producing hallucinations and attributing them to their products.

There have been a lot of copyright lawsuits since the early days of LLM chatbots, but only a few have been settled. One judgment is from the Anthropic case, where a judge found that training on copyrighted works was «no different than training schoolchildren to write well».

Other judges have been more skeptical.

Read more: Reuters, TechCrunch, Engadget.

Sora 2 video generation could be heading for ChatGPT «soon»

Sora video generation in ChatGPT would expand access, but also increase costs. (Picture: generated)
The Information and ChatGPT-watcher Tibor Blaho are both reporting an upcoming release of video generation in the main ChatGPT app.

According to The Information’s x.com post, the release seems imminent, while Blaho has spotted Sora generation mentions and ID’s in the latest Andoid beta ChatGPT App.

Sora 2 was launched as a quasi social network with its own app in October 2025 and was invite-only.

Judging by early search interest on Google for «Sora invite code» soon after launch, interest for the app greatly exceeded capacity and available invites.

It produces 10-second clips from prompts or pictures and promises to put your likeness in anything you can imagine. It briefly went viral, running up some 920 million weekly users before dropping from #1 to #165 in the App Store.

Putting the app’s features into the mainline GPT app will bring it up to par with Google’s AI subscriptions, which gives users access to the video generator Veo 3 on the $25 Pro plan.

Read more: The Information (paywalled), Tibor Blaho on X, and Reuters.

OpenAI puts «adult mode» on the back burner, for now

«Adult mode» on ChatGPT gets another postponement. (Picture: generated)
The much touted feature last showed up as «naughty chats» in the Android app just two weeks ago, but is now postponed indefinitely.

It was supposed to debut in the first quarter of 2026, after first being conceived as «letting adults be adults» in October 2025. It was supposed to run in tandem with age verification, rolled out this January.

OpenAI says that «we still believe in the principle of treating adults like adults, but getting the experience right will take more time,» writes Axios.

The postponement is due to the company focusing on other high priority issues, such as «intelligence, personality improvements, personalization,» and «making the experience more proactive.»

Read more: Axios and TechCrunch.

OpenAI’s robotics and hardware head leaves in Pentagon protest

Caitlin Kalinowski, head of robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, makes no qualms about her feelings on their new contract with the Pentagon, and is resigning in protest, saying that:

— Surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s robotics and hardware head leaves in Pentagon protest”

OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-5.4 has native computer use and less hallucinations

The latest version of ChatGPT sees a marked jump in the benchmarks. (Picture: Adobe)
The new Thinking and Pro models are more «capable and efficient» and is the first OpenAI model with native computer use skills. It also improves on hallucinations and Office files creation — areas where Anthropic has been thriving.

— Together with advances in general reasoning, coding, and professional knowledge work, GPT‑5.4 enables more reliable agents, faster developer workflows, and higher-quality outputs across ChatGPT, the API, and Codex, OpenAI writes.

On hallucinations, it is 33% less likely to be wrong in its responses, and 18% less apt to have mistakes in replies compared to GPT‑5.2.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s new ChatGPT-5.4 has native computer use and less hallucinations”

OpenAI ships Codex app for Windows — running in the Linux subsystem

The official Codex app has finally arrived for Windows, almost a month to the day after first debuting on macOS.

It runs natively in the Windows Subsystem for Linux, and has integrated terminals for PowerShell, Command Prompt, and Git Bash.

It also has all the «regular» features the Mac version has — and is a fully integrated multi-agent coding environment.

The Windows app is also properly sandboxed, so you can block it from accessing files outside your working folder and «prevent outbound links» unless you approve it, writes OpenAI’s Andrew Ambrosino on x.com.

In addition, your session history is stored on your OpenAI account, making it possible to start coding on a Mac and finish it on Windows without losing work, Engadget notes.

The app is available today from the Microsoft Store.

Read more: Andrew Ambrosino’s announcement, Engadget and Microsoft Store.

Jensen Huang says Nvidia’s investment opportunity in AI labs is closing

Huang figures the privately owned AI labs era might be finished. (Picture: Nvidia)
The Nvidia CEO says the opportunity to invest might soon end, Reuters reports.

The reason for this is straightforward, suspecting that Anthropic and OpenAI going public «later this year» will shutter the window to private equity deals.

The latest deal to fund OpenAI with $30 billion «might be the last time» to «invest in a consequential company like this,» Huang admits.

Nvidia has invested some $130 billion in OpenAI in two rounds, the recent straight up investment, and one circular deal where they paid $100 billion in return for OpenAI buying $100 billion in chips from them.

Likewise, Nvidia was an investor in a November funding round for Anthropic, buying $15 billion in shares from the company.

Read more: Reuters, CNBC and TechCrunch.

OpenAI eyes unclassified NATO contract, The Wall Street Journal reports

OpenAI seems to be making a big push for defense contracts. (Picture: DOD photo by Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Dominique A. Pineiro, CC BY 2.0)
Just days after striking a deal with the Pentagon, it would seem that OpenAI is actively pursuing more deals in the defense sector, writes The Wall Street Journal.

During an all-hands meeting at OpenAI on Tuesday, Sam Altman tried to clear the air on their recent Pentagon contract debacle — which has seen some twists and turns before landing on very clear language against use in mass surveillance.

Of note at the meeting, he said that OpenAI was considering a contract to deploy on NATO’s classified network, although he was confirmed to have misspoken by a spokesperson, saying the deal being considered was for the unclassified parts of the defense alliance.

Later on Wednesday, Reuters confirmed that such a deal is indeed under consideration, citing sources «familiar with the matter.»

While talking, he said, among other things, that the US military had been a «great benefit to all of humanity over the last 250 years,» The WSJ writes, and added that «Clearly, the military has done things that I extremely disagree with, and am sure will do more in the future.»

Read more: The Wall Street Journal and Reuters.

OpenAI launches GPT-5.3-instant with fewer lectures and less hallucinations

GPT-5.3-Instant performs better than 5.1-Instant and is a little behind 5.2-Instant, but is better at conversation. (Picture: Adobe)
Hallucinations are down 27% when it uses the web and ~20% in reasoning, and OpenAI did actually notice that the 5.2 model often cames across like a nanny — berating users with obvious, condescending lectures for harmless questions.

This has been solved by reducing unnecessary «dead ends,» caveats and «declarative formulations» in order to let the conversation flow more freely — solving one of many users’ major gripes with the current OpenAI models.

The model is also better at search, combining search responses with its own knowledge and reasoning. This should put results into context instead of just summarizing results.

Bu the real update with this model is bringing ChatGPT to a more natural style and tone with freely flowing conversation — which should be far less «cringe.»

OpenAI is promising less «Stop. Take a breath»-responses, or «I’m going to calm this down» kinds of outputs. It should also be better at creative writing.

GPT-5.3-instant is available today in the app (choose Instant in the model selector), API and web, and updates to Thinking and Pro are «coming soon.»

Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on 9to5Google, TechCrunch and The Register.