OpenAI kicked off an AI revolution with DALL-E and ChatGPT, making the organization the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI became a story unto itself when Altman was briefly fired and then brought back after pressure from staff and Microsoft, an investor and close partner.
The Information reports on OpenAI’s rocky $500 billion partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, which “has not staffed up and is not developing any of OpenAI’s data centers.”
OpenAI reportedly explored building its own data centers as the three companies disagreed over their roles, but the high costs have led the AI giant to strike individual deals with SoftBank and Oracle instead.
After a previously-announced $100 billion deal went “on ice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported, Nvidia is nearing a $30 billion equity investment as part of a larger funding round, the Financial Times reports. The investment might be tied up as soon as this weekend.
Adthena, an “AI search intelligence” platform, has spotted ads in ChatGPT, and they can apparently trigger as soon as after your first prompt.
Ads from Expedia, Qualcomm, Best Buy, and Enterprise Mobility are starting to show up in ChatGPT responses, OpenAI told Adweek.
The AI industry is rife with defections, FOMO, and radical mission statements. It’s about to get supercharged.
Charles Porch, who helped land Instagram’s biggest partnerships — including the launch of Beyoncé’s self-titled album on the social network — will now serve as OpenAI’s first VP of global creative partnerships.
“I’m going to be the person that’s talking to creative communities around the world to figure out how we build the best products to serve them,” Porch tells Vanity Fair.
Focus Features is billing The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist as an “eye-opening” exploration of “the most powerful technology humanity has ever created.” You’d think the doc might feature some critical voices, but its new trailer makes it feel like it might be one big commercial. The film premieres on March 27th.
Lockdown Mode is “not necessary” for most people and “tightly constrains how ChatGPT can interact with external systems to reduce the risk of prompt injection–based data exfiltration,” according to OpenAI.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Zoë Hitzig, a researcher who left OpenAI this week, expresses concerns about the company’s move to put ads in ChatGPT, while posing alternatives to a setup that could potentially harm users down the line:
So the real question is not ads or no ads. It is whether we can design structures that avoid both excluding people from using these tools, and potentially manipulating them as consumers. I think we can.
Members of the team — which was tasked with ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity — have been transferred to other areas of the company, and former team lead Joshua Achiam will take on a new role as OpenAI’s “chief futurist,” Platformer reported.
[Platformer]
Ryan Beiermeister, previously vice president of the product policy team, was reportedly fired in early January over alleged sexual discrimination against a male colleague. Beiermeister, who called the allegation “absolutely false,” had opposed adding adult content, and worried safeguards weren’t strong enough. OpenAI said her firing was “not related to any issue she raised.”
We’d heard its devices could arrive this year, but in a court filing OpenAI vice president Peter Welinder said they won’t reach customers before March 2027.
The case is a trademark infringement suit from audio startup iyO, which sued after OpenAI bought Jony Ive’s company io — Welinder confirmed OpenAI has no plans to use the io name for its hardware.
The round of Big Game ads Anthropic previewed earlier this week set Sam Altman off, as he called them “clearly dishonest.”
Now, while the original ad says, “Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” nodding to OpenAI’s plans, the one that aired replaced it with a new tagline: “There is a time and place for ads. Your conversations with AI should not be one of them.”
As OpenAI and Anthropic feud over AI advertising, both companies are running Super Bowl ads for their AI products. After OpenAI boss Sam Altman said its ad would focus on “builders,” OpenAI debuted this ad about its AI coding agent, Codex.
ChatGPT is much more well-known, but enterprise use of tools like Codex is probably where OpenAI’s money is.
GPT‑5.3‑Codex, its new coding and development model, is apparently the first “that was instrumental in creating itself.” No, that probably doesn’t mean ChatGPT is ready to build its own Skynet, but it can help in debugging and testing:
“The Codex team used early versions to debug its own training, manage its own deployment, and diagnose test results and evaluations—our team was blown away by how much Codex was able to accelerate its own development.”
ChatGPT users who create designs via the Canva app can now connect to their Canva Brand Kits, allowing designs to draw from on-brand colors and assets. Anthropic’s good week continues, however — Claude got the same Canva Brand Kit feature first.
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“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” is a clear shot at OpenAI’s decision to bring ads to ChatGPT without mentioning it by name. There are four commercials in the campaign, with one trimmed to thirty-seconds to air during the Super Bowl at a cost of around $8 million.
OpenAI’s new “head of preparedness,” Dylan Scandinaro, came from an AGI safety role at the company’s chief competitor. “AI is advancing rapidly,” he wrote in a post on X. “The potential benefits are great—and so are the risks of extreme and even irrecoverable harm. There’s a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it!”
[X (formerly Twitter)]
In the middle of a Forbes profile of Altman’s journey through the AI world — which is just astoundingly chaotic, when you see it all laid out in a row — Altman says that “we basically have built AGI, or very close to it.” Which, uh, okay! But then he changes his mind, sort of. From the story:
A few days later, Altman dials things back. “I meant that as a spiritual statement, not a literal one,” he says. Achieving AGI, he concedes, will require “a lot of medium-sized breakthroughs. I don’t think we need a big one.”
Disney’s deal with OpenAI includes a plan to allow Sora users to create 30-second clips featuring over 250 Disney characters while some will appear in curated vertical video feeds inside Disney Plus, CEO Bob Iger told investors on Monday. Iger said the feature could arrive “sometime in fiscal 2026,” adding the company hopes to allow Disney Plus subscribers to create them directly on its platform:
What this deal does is by giving us the ability to curate what has been basically created by Sora onto Disney, is it jumpstarts our ability to have short form video on Disney Plus.
The deal, announced in September, is “on ice,” according to The Wall Street Journal, though there are apparently still talks about a deal of some kind:
Now, the two sides are rethinking the future of their partnership, some of the people said. The latest discussions, they said, include an equity investment of tens of billions of dollars as part of OpenAI’s current funding round.
[The Wall Street Journal]
After the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI brought GPT-4o back for paid subscribers because users missed it, but now, “only 0.1% of users” are still choosing GPT‑4o “each day,” the company says.
OpenAI will retire GPT‑4o, GPT‑4.1, GPT‑4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini from ChatGPT on February 13th.
