OpenAI

OpenAI is slated to close the largest funding round in history at $6.5 billion next week, and as the Wall Street Journal reports, Apple has just pulled out of the round in the eleventh hour.

Apple’s involvement was already surprising—it’s rare for the iPhone maker to invest in external companies. The reporting of a potential investment came after Apple announced a ChatGPT integration into Siri.

The New York Times reports that documents shown to potential investors in just another tech company have an interesting detail:

Roughly 10 million ChatGPT users pay the company a $20 monthly fee, according to the documents. OpenAI expects to raise that price by two dollars by the end of the year, and will aggressively raise it to $44 over the next five years, the documents said.

The proposed investment could value the company at $150 billion and give it two years to convert to a for-profit business before the funding becomes debt.

The AI Act came into law on August 1st, but some rules for “high risk” systems won’t be enforced until August 2027. Now, companies like Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and Samsung are promising to make a head start.

Meta and Apple (which have been critical of the EU’s AI stance) are notably absent, but OpenAI has signed the pledge despite previous grumblings.

The feature, which gives ChatGPT a more conversational tone, is rolling out now to Plus and Team users. My colleague Kylie got a chance to check out the feature ahead of its release and said it left her feeling “equal parts amazed and uncomfortable.”

My home office has a lot of knick knacks: a Kirby pencil case, a mirror that looks like a CD, and a light-up Majora’s Mask. It turns out, though, I should step my game up.

In a recent podcast interview, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his home office is decorated with objects tracking the technological development of humanity, including a hand ax, which he often stares at.

“I just think about how far we have come from this single piece of technology we used everything for.”

Sam Altman published some thoughts today about what artificial intelligence will mean in a couple of decades.

Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace.

Altman, who reportedly recently told employees OpenAI is moving away from its non-profit-controlled structure, makes other lofty, hard-to-believe claims. One claim — “there will also be downsides” — feels on the money, though.

The company announced OpenAI Academy, which it says “will invest in developers and organizations leveraging AI to help solve hard problems and catalyze economic growth in their communities.”

Details such as how to apply and when the program will launch are scant, but OpenAI says the academy will offer AI training and technical guidance and $1 million in API credits, among other things.

CEO Sam Altman told employees in a company-wide meeting that OpenAI’s complicated corporate structure as a for-profit endeavor under the umbrella of a non-profit is set to change, “likely sometime next year,” reports Fortune.

The reconfiguring, which has been rumored before, would reportedly shift the company “away from being controlled by a non-profit.” OpenAI told the outlet that the “non-profit is core to our mission and will continue to exist.”

OpenAI unveiled the first in a series of “reasoning” models on Thursday, accompanied by a safety card highlighting some alarming capabilities. It’s also the first time the startup has rated a model “medium” risk.

The weirdest part, as Transformer points out, is that the researchers found that the new model “sometimes instrumentally faked alignment during testing” and would strategically manipulate “task data in order to make its misaligned action look more aligned”.

OpenAI’s new model is designed to be better at writing code, and GitHub says that “our initial testing showed promising results in code analysis and optimization.”

That’s 1 million paid users for corporate services including ChatGPT Team, Enterprise, and ChatGPT Edu for universities, Bloomberg reports. Enterprise pricing varies, but one person claimed it could cost around $60 per user per month with a minimum of 150 users and a 12-month contract.

I always thought the only way AI might make some cash is through enterprise software bundling, especially with all the free users.

OpenAI’s ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who left not long after attempting to oust fellow co-founder Sam Altman, has now raised $1 billion for his competing lab, Safe Superintelligence (SSI). Backers include a16z, which has opposed California’s AI safety bill, and OpenAI investor Sequoia.

SSI’s CEO tells Reuters there’s no product yet, and there likely won’t be one for a few years.

Alongside its big funding round that could include investments from Apple and Nvidia, OpenAI may also change its structure “so that it is more appealing to investors,” The New York Times reports. OpenAI is a nonprofit with a for-profit subsidiary.

The NYT also says OpenAI has elevated Chris Lehane, who worked at Airbnb and in the Clinton administration, to be its VP of global policy.

She’ll be speaking to them as part of an ABC special, titled “AI and the Future of Us,” that will debut on September 12th at 8ET and be available on Hulu the next day, TheWrap reports.

OpenAI announced it’s partnering with Condé Nast, which owns publications like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Wired. OpenAI will display Condé Nast’s content in its new AI-powered search engine prototype, SearchGPT (but provided no details on if it’s using Condé’s content as training data).

These media/AI company deals are becoming more common because media execs seem to believe that accepting the money, rather than laying off staff to afford lengthy legal battles, is the best option for now. (Also, Vox Media has a partnership with OpenAI.)

The company closed the waitlist for its “prototype” generative search product, sending out emails like the one below to signed-up users who weren’t chosen to test it.

The company has said only 10,000 users will get access at first, which could help it if its searchbot gives bad recommendations like gluing slippery cheese to pizza.

Here’s what Eric Schmidt, who was Google’s CEO from 2004 to 2011 and then chairman until 2015, had to say recently during a talk at Stanford:

Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning. And the reason startups work is because people work like hell.

Update, August 14th: It appears that Schmidt didn’t intend for his comments to make headlines! Stanford has taken the video of his talk down, so here’s a clip that is still online:

For more of the backstory and ambition behind Worldcoin, the eyeball-scanning-for-cryptocurrency startup that Sam Altman thinks could one day save us all from an AI-controlled world, check out this piece from Bloomberg’s Ashley Vance:

Blania and Altman, who formally outlined their Worldcoin master plan a year ago, have since received feedback that might be generously described as mixed. On one hand, they’ve already persuaded more than 6 million people to go before an Orb and sign up for a World ID, and the sign-up rate has been surging this year. The total value of the digital currency (WLD) is more than $550 million. At a factory in Germany, Orbs are heading toward mass production and will soon be dispersed around the globe in a bid to push these numbers even higher.

The startup has appointed Zico Kolter, a professor and the director of the Machine Learning Department at Carnegie Mellon University, to its board of directors. Kolter will also join the Board’s Safety and Security Committee alongside a group of other board members and CEO Sam Altman.

Kolter has a background in developing safety methods for large language models and formerly worked as the Chief Data Scientist at C3.ai.