OpenAI

OpenAI just announced an alpha program for a new tool (called reinforcement fine-tuning) that lets developers train models on specific tasks, using example problems and answers. In a post after the livestream announcement, CEO Sam Altman said this will make it “really easy to create expert models in specific domains with very little training data.”

I’m at The New York Times DealBook Summit, where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently got off stage with Andrew Ross Sorkin. Some highlights:

- He doesn’t think Elon Musk will wield his new political power against business rivals: “It would go so deeply against the values I believe he holds very dear to himself.”

- His disagreement with my view that OpenAI and Microsoft are in the process of breaking up: “I don’t think we’re disentangling.”

You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

Kate Rouch, the former CMO of Coinbase, has been hired by OpenAI to lead its marketing efforts, Ad Age reported.

OpenAI has been padding out its c-suite this year: It hired Sarah Friar as chief financial officer, Kevin Weil as chief business officer, Scott Schools as chief compliance officer, and Aaron Chatterji as its chief economist. Notably, they haven’t hired a CTO to replace Mira Murati, who recently departed.

In an interview with the Financial Times, OpenAI’s new CFO Sarah Friar said that the startup was considering an ads model and it planned to be “thoughtful about when and where we implement” ads.

In a statement following the interview, though, Friar added:

“While we’re open to exploring other revenue streams in the future, we have no active plans to pursue advertising.”

A federal judge denied OpenAI’s bid to force The New York Times to reveal how its reporters use AI tools, ruling that the discovery request was overly broad. The ruling’s final metaphor gives you a hint of how silly the judge found the whole thing:

“If a copyright holder sued a video game manufacturer for copyright infringement ... the video game manufacturer would not be entitled to wide-ranging discovery concerning the copyright holder’s employees’ gaming history.”

The Information has the scoop. If this happens, it wouldn’t be too surprising to me — seems like a natural next step for a company that already has its own search engine and native ChatGPT apps.

OpenAI has apparently also had discussions with Samsung about powering AI tools on its devices, The Information reports.

Dotdash Meredith, the publisher of People, Better Homes & Gardens, and InStyle, announced a licensing deal with OpenAI in May (as did The Verge's parent company, Vox Media). Now, AdWeek is reporting this $16 million minimum figure based on comments from a recent earnings call:

If you look at Q3 24, licensing revenue was up about $4.1 million year-over-year. The lion’s share of that would be driven by the OpenAI license...the variable components will be calculated and recognized in the future.

Mayor-elect Daniel Lurie has enlisted OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and nine other San Francisco leaders to guide his administration’s efforts to revitalize the city (and win back the support of its disgruntled tech elite).

The move comes as prominent figures like Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, Elon Musk, and YCombinator president Gary Tan openly criticize San Francisco’s public safety failures, with some even threatening to relocate.

On this day, one year ago, Sam Altman was fired from OpenAI — an event known internally as “The Blip.”

His influence has seemingly only increased since he overcame the attempted coup. The board that ousted him was gutted and key executives, like Ilya Sutskever and Mira Murati, have departed. Next year, OpenAI will likely be restructured into a for-profit company, becoming exactly what it was created to avoid.

The app launched last month, but was initially was only available for paid users. Now, all users can try it, OpenAI says.

The AI chatbot can now “see” what’s on your screen in VS Code, Xcode, Terminal, and iTerm2, allowing ChatGPT to provide suggestions or answer questions about your code without having to copy and paste it into the app using its “Work with Apps” option that’s currently in beta testing.

Though ChatGPT still can’t write code directly within coding platforms, it seems OpenAI is working on that.

OpenAI president and cofounder Greg Brockman, who took a 3-month leave of absence from the company, is back at the company. (Brockman previously said his sabbatical would last through the end of the year.) His return comes after the startup lost several key leaders: CTO Mira Murati and chief research officer Bob McGrew.

Per a memo, he’s working with CEO Sam Altman on creating a new role for him.

Caitlin Kalinowski will lead robotics and consumer hardware at OpenAI, according to a post on LinkedIn. Kalinowski also worked at Apple as a hardware product design engineer.

Jony Ive — also, famously, formerly of Apple — recently confirmed that he’s working with on an AI hardware project with OpenAI.

What did Ilya see? What is going on with OpenAI’s next big model? Are we getting autonomous agents soon?

All of those questions and more were answered (and artfully dodged) by OpenAI’s leadership on Thursday in a Reddit AMA. I threaded some of the highlights, which include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman alluding to AI as “the transcendent future.”