openai Archives - Page 3 of 14

OpenAI sounds warning about the AI future, and offers a policy roadmap

OpenAI is offering policy suggestions for an AI world, and warns it is coming sooner than you think. (Picture: Shutterstock)

We are entering the AI age with all engines running, OpenAI says, and we need to be prepared for a future where production is done by robots, capital gains amass rapidly and regular people might be forced out.

While saying there are ways to mitigate this, like offering a four-day workweek and massively expanding the social safety net akin to the New Deal policies after the Great Depression, OpenAI says time is running out.

Their proposals suggest drastically increasing capital gains taxes and offers an idea to tax automation in factories, as they push regular people out of jobs — and envisions creating a public wealth fund powered by AI, that can empower citizens directly and offer them a stake in the future.

OpenAIs policy paper also lays out how they see access to AI as «foundational for participation in the modern economy» and is similar to that of cars or electricity. Every citizen should have access, they say.

Read more: The policy paper (13 pages, dense). Writeups on Axios, Business Insider and TechCrunch.

OpenAI officially closes $122 billion funding round at $852B valuation

OpenAI is by far the most used and valued AI lab, with 40% of revenue from enterprise customers. (Picture: Adobe)

Ahead of a possible stock market debut, the ChatGPT maker is also saying that it will be available in «several» market-traded ETFs managed by Ark Invest.

This will be the first time OpenAI can be traded by individual investors, and over $3 billion is being raised by banks.

The round is led by «strategic partners» Amazon, Nvidia and SoftBank, as previously reported, and OpenAI is committed to consume 2 gigawatts of compute from AWS as part of the deal.

In its announcement, OpenAI brags that ChatGPT has «more than 900 million weekly active users, and over 50 million subscribers. 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.»

— These are not just growth milestones — they show that frontier AI is becoming part of everyday life for people around the world, they say.

At the same time, OpenAI is openly confirming that they are indeed building a super app, that will combine ChatGPT, Codex, browsing, and «broader agentic capabilities»

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

OpenAI projects $100 million in annualized revenue from ChatGPT ads test

Ads on ChatGPT are just being shown to a tiny fraction of users, but that’s about to change. (Picture: Adobe)

The figure was reached from a small pilot of 600 advertisers serving less than 20% of Free and Go users, Reuters reports.

85% of these users in the USA are eligible to receive ads, but far fewer ads are shown in the trial that started in February.

The minimum asking price to get on the test program is said to be $200,000 and the projected revenue once the trial goes live to more users is about a billion dollars a year.

80% of the advertisers on the platform are small and medium-sized businesses, Reuters notes, and OpenAI is set to debut a self-serve advertising platform already in April.

Read more: Reuters and CNBC.

OpenAI scraps Adult Mode «indefinitely,» Financial Times reports

After running into strong headwinds, letting «adults be adults» is out at OpenAI. (Picture: generated)

It now seems official that there won’t be an Adult Mode, or «smutty chat» on ChatGPT, due to challenges of training it, internal dismay and investor concerns, The Financial Times (paywalled) says.

Offering an Adult Mode on ChatGPT was a promise made by CEO Sam Altman in October 2025, but quickly ran into problems, leading to delays, and later postponement.

Continue reading “OpenAI scraps Adult Mode «indefinitely,» Financial Times reports”

OpenAI axes Sora video app and API, and it won’t live on in ChatGPT

Contrary to earlier rumors, the app won’t be integrated into ChatGPT, writes The Wall Street Journal and Reuters, citing an internal email by CEO Sam Altman.

The video generation app had amassed 920 million users since December 2025 and was for a while the number one app on the App Store, before declining to #165 recently.

Closing the free app, estimated to cost $15 million per day, opens up resources for OpenAI’s recent focus on coding and business, as it was labelled a «side quest» internally.

With Sora discontinued, OpenAI is also leaving behind a $1 billion deal with Disney — which had licensed some of its characters for use on the platform. Disney says they are open to new investments, and «respects» OpenAI’s decision.

Read more: The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and Tibor Blaho.

As OpenAI prepares to show ads to all Free and Go users, advertisers are giddy

Everyone on Free and Go plans will be getting ads before soon. (Picture: screenshot)

According to The Information (paywalled), OpenAI will soon stop its «experiment» in ads. They will go for a full advertising service in «the coming weeks,» reports Reuters.

That means the test with showing some ads to about 5% of users is coming to an end, and the full plan will start up just after easter.

The limited advertising has so far been a success. The main complaint from advertisers is that it’s going too slow, according to CNBC. Most of them are happy and ready to spend more — with more varied ads.

— We’re encouraged by early signals from users and participating brands, and continue to see strong interest from advertisers, OpenAI tells CNBC.

The advertising program on Free and Go tiers is expected to earn OpenAI about $1 billion per year, and usher in a third tier for advertisers in addition to Search, Social, and Retail.

Read more: The Information (paywalled), Reuters, and CNBC.

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.

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.