OpenAI

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.

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.”

ChatGPT’s web app will have a new magnifying glass icon that you can use to search through all your old chats. OpenAI is rolling out this feature to Plus and Team members starting today, while free users will gain access “throughout the next month.”

Here’s what Dr. Chatterji, a Duke professor and former CHIPS coordinator for the White House, will do, according to OpenAI:

In this new role, Dr. Chatterji will lead research into how AI will influence economic growth and job creation; including the global economic impacts of building AI infrastructure, insights on longer-term labor market trends, and how to help the current and future workforce harness the benefits of this technology. 

Murati is seeking venture capital funds for a new AI startup with its own proprietary models, Reuters reported Friday.

Barret Zoph, an OpenAI researcher who left the same day as Murati may join the venture, according to unnamed sources cited by the outlet.

Microsoft is figuring out how its $14 billion investment in OpenAI will translate into equity when the AI startup transitions into a for-profit company (this transition must occur within two years, or recent investors in the $6.6 billion round can claw back their investment).

To determine the equity distribution, Microsoft and OpenAI have enlisted Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, respectively.

This New York Times report mentions Microsoft's investment hesitations after last year's upheaval, that Oracle deal, and the Inflection acquihire as notable stressors on the "bromance."

Also, "some" at OpenAI might blame Microsoft if it's beaten to AGI "because it hasn’t given OpenAI the computing power it needs," while noting that successfully building AGI could activate a contract clause cutting Microsoft off from OpenAI's tech.

Interesting.

OpenAI disrupted more than 20 foreign influence operations over the past year, according to its quarterly threat report. But there’s no “evidence of this leaning to meaningful breakthroughs in their ability to create substantially new malware or build viral audiences,” the report says.

AI has let foreign actors “more quickly and convincingly tailor synthetic content.” But so far, it isn’t reaching much of an audience.

Hearst, which owns a substantial portion of the media landscape, has just signed a deal with OpenAI to integrate Hearst content into its products (The Verge’s parent company Vox Media also partners with OpenAI).

Hearst owns 24 daily newspapers and 52 weekly newspapers, 175 websites and more than 200 magazine editions worldwide, making this one of OpenAI’s biggest media partnerships.

I’m coming to you live from my hot-as-hell apartment here in San Francisco. We’re facing a historic heat wave and none of us have apartment air conditioning.

Even funnier, the AC at OpenAI HQ is broken, according to an employee. The office is based in the Mission district, which tends to get hotter than the rest of the city. (One Google DeepMind staffer flaunted his working AC in reply: “We’re hiring!”)

With several media companies striking AI training deals with OpenAI, the number of websites blocking GPTBot has taken a big dip, according to data seen by Wired:

At its peak, the high was just over a third of the websites; it has now dropped down closer to a quarter. Within a smaller pool of the most prominent news outlets, the block rate is still above 50 percent, but it’s down from heights earlier this year of almost 90 percent.

From Bloomberg:

At an all-hands meeting last week, Altman told employees the company is not looking to replace [Mira] Murati in the CTO role for now, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Mira Murati announced last week that she was leaving OpenAI.