If you haven’t caught up yet, Anthropic has sworn off ads and are using their Super Bowl to time decry them.
This has caused a very real spat with OpenAI, and Sam Altman posted a long screed about how Anthropic is misrepresenting how ads will work in ChatGPT.
GPT-5.3-Codex is here!
*Best coding performance (57% SWE-Bench Pro, 76% TerminalBench 2.0, 64% OSWorld).
*Mid-task steerability and live updates during tasks.
*Faster! Less than half the tokens of 5.2-Codex for same tasks, and >25% faster per token!
*Good computer use.— Sam Altman (@sama) February 5, 2026
The new coding model is 25% faster — letting it do long-running tasks in a shorter time frame.
It’s the first OpenAI model that was built with itself. They used early versions of it to debug, manage deployment and diagnose test results, and say they were impressed with its capabilities.
Continue reading “OpenAI releases GPT-5.3-Codex, faster and more capable”
The job post almost instantly went viral in December, with CEO Sam Altman warning of biological and hacking risks — saying things were moving so fast they urgently needed someone for the «stressful job,» to be ready to «jump into the deep end pretty much immediately.»
On the hiring, Altman says he has found the best candidate for the job, and is «extremely excited» to welcome Scandinaro, who says there are great benefits ahead, but also warns of «irrecoverable harm» if not handled correctly.
— Things are about to move quite fast and we will be working with extremely powerful models soon. This will require commensurate safeguards to ensure we can continue to deliver tremendous benefits, Altman writes.
What is for certain is that AI is getting more capable with every new model, and Altman says:
— We are heading toward a system that will be capable of doing innovation on its own, I don’t think most of the world has internalized what that’s going to mean.
On AGI, he says they would need «a lot of medium-sized breakthroughs. I don’t think we need a big one.»
Go read the full profile on Forbes, that takes you through Altman’s early career, with OpenAI as «destiny,» what he thinks about hardware — and how he plans to exit one day.
Introducing the Codex app—a powerful command center for building with agents.
Now available on macOS.https://t.co/HW05s2C9Nr
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) February 2, 2026
For your discerning coding needs, you are no longer tied to the Codex web interface or terminal window, and can now vibe code on your own macOS app. Windows support is «comining soon.”
The app supports multitasking agents, creating and using skills, and automations.
Read more about it and get the app here.
To celebrate the launch, Codex is now available for Free and Go tiers, and paid plans get double the usage limits for «a limited time.»
The reason for bringing them back was how clinical and cerebral, and less friendly GPT-5 had gotten, leading to a very public backlash.
After this, OpenAI spent a lot of time thinking about personality and customization — leading to GPT-5.2, which now has the overwhelming majority of users.
The previously very popular 4o model is now only used by 0.1% of users.
In their announcement today, OpenAI also says they are making progress towards a more creative version of GPT for adults, having rolled out age prediction earlier this month.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, discussion on r/ChatGPT.
SoftBank and Nvidia will be the largest investors, clocking in at $30 billion each, while Amazon will pitch in «potentially» $20 billion and Microsoft will contribute «less than» $10 billion, according to Reuters and The Information.
Apparently, Amazon’s investment could come with a caveat that OpenAI expands its cloud server rental with the company, which will likely not be a large hitch.
This will also be SoftBank’s second investment in OpenAI, after recently completing a $41 billion investment, and selling out Nvidia.
That would bring their holdings to $71 billion, which is still short of Microsoft’s reported stake of $135 billion.
Read more: Reuters, and The Information, summarized by Reuters.
That’s where OpenAI’s new service comes in — as a LaTeX-native interface, it combines the paper writing in the same space as it does equations, references and «surrounding context.»
Of course there is a GPT-5.2 engine right there, so it’s easy to cross-reference and check for originality, find citations and proofread — and it’s a fairly nice research assistant, to boot.
Prism is available as of now for anyone who has a personal account with OpenAI.
Read more: OpenAI’s launch page, launch tweet, The tool itself, writeup on Gizmodo.
The scales are still low — with 1.3 million users discussing «advanced hard science,» and an average of 8.3 million weekly messages on the topics.
To put this into perspective, an October, 2025, survey from OpenAI said that 0.15% of ChatGPT users engaged in conversations on self-harm and suicide, or roughly 1.2 million customers.
Continue reading “OpenAI says ChatGPT increasingly used in hard science”
They are now partnering with the giant government contractor/consultancy Leidos, according to a release, to «integrate Open AI-powered generative and agentic AI into the core workflows of customers in strategic markets.»
This starts by deploying OpenAI’s technology internally for the company, and then by «harnessing the transformative power of AI to help improve how federal agencies operate.»
OpenAI says they want to move «beyond experimentation and into real-world deployment that improves efficiency, resilience and public service.»
Read more: Leidos press release, Gizmodo.
From the papers, it seems Microsoft was ready with a whole new AI subsidiary to form after Sam Altman’s ouster as CEO in November 2023 — complete with a legal framework, ready to send to the Washington Secretary of State at a moments notice.
They had already budgeted for about $25 billion in costs to «absorb the OpenAI team.»
When Altman returned to OpenAI after a short while, he was already discussing possible board members with Microsoft.
The winner of the early story seems to be Microsoft, retaining leverage over «Major Decisions» up until the for profit reorganization of OpenAI.
Microsoft also retains the rights to OpenAI’s technology until 2032. Musk is suing for breach of contract/trust and is demanding $134 billion from OpenAI.
Read the full scoop at GeekWire.
Age prediction works by taking in several factors such as usage time, account age and the time the user is active.
It is developed «in dialogue» with experts from the American Psychological Association, ConnectSafely, and Global Physicians Network.
After several wrongful death lawsuits involving teens, disturbing mental health conversations and stating that principles are in conflict, OpenAI was more or less forced into doing something on both teen use and parental controls.
Those deemed under 18 by the AI will be served a vanilla version of ChatGPT without beauty standards, violence or romantic role-play, to name a few examples.
If someone gets wrongfully lobbed into the teen experience, and it does make mistakes, they can upload a selfie for proper verification through Persona.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, CNBC, Engadget.
This means for instance that they will cooperate with power utility companies at each site to ensure they are «paying our own way on energy.»
That could entail building out the infrastructure for each site where needed, or simply strengthening the grid.
They also address water usage, and note that Stargate Abilene will use as much water annually as the community uses in a day, thanks to «innovations in the cooling water systems design.»
OpenAI is even committing to slowing down workloads on days with adverse conditions, to lighten the load on the grid.
There have been at least 25 data center cancellations in the USA due to opposition from local communities, Gizmodo reports.
They are typically worried about rising electricity and water costs, which OpenAI is now directly addressing.
Read more: OpenAI’s blog, Reuters, Bloomberg.
Friar says revenue and compute grow in tandem with the advent of more powerful models — that they «scale with intelligence,» so to speak.
Looking at the numbers, compute has gone from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to 1.9 GW in 2025, growing about 3x every year since ChatGPT’s debut.
Financially, OpenAI now has $20 billion in revenue, following the same curve as the compute scale and growing about 3x per year from $2 billion in 2024.
All this is of course before ads arrive on the free tier, and before OpenAI sees any results from its global rollout of the go subscription on their revenue.
On the compute side, OpenAI is chasing infrastructure like there is no tomorrow, closing in on more than 30 GW before 2030 in what would be truly explosive growth — and we can only wonder as to how advanced frontier AI models will get by then.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement, writeups on Reuters, .
OpenAI says they won’t share your data or conversation to advertisers, and will «maintain a high standard» where you can turn off personalization if you want to.
They won’t be shown to under-18s, they say, nor will they show on sensitive topics, such as physical health, mental health or politics.
The neat part of the coming ads is that you click on them and query them for further detail, which is a feature not found in traditional advertising.
The Financial times estimates that OpenAI can earn somewhere around the «low billions» from advertising.
Ads won’t be shown for paying tiers, such as Plus, Pro and Enterprise.
Read more: OpenAI’s announcement. Writeups on Reuters, The Verge and Ars Technica.