Kylie Robison

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.

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.

A new wave of layoffs has hit X, primarily affecting its engineering department, according to two sources inside X and posts on the workplace forum Blind. The exact scale of the job cuts remains unknown.

These cuts come just two months after staffers were required to submit a one-page summary telling leadership their contributions to the company (but it’s unclear if those one-pagers played a role).

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.”