As OpenAI gears up to become a for-profit company next year, it is releasing ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, which brings a humanlike conversation mode to ChatGPT 4o. All U.S. subscribers to ChatGPT Plus and Team plans will gain access to the new feature, which will also be made available to those paying for ChatGPT Edu and Enterprise plans in the coming weeks. The firm is also adding five new voices and allowing customers to save personalized instructions for the voice assistant, including memory behaviors. Concurrently, executives including CTO Mira Murati have resigned as the company pivots to commerciality.

Murati announced her departure yesterday, followed hours later by news that Chief Research Officer Bob McGrew and Research VP Barret Zoph are also leaving, The New York Times reports.

The moves came as OpenAI’s “chief executive, Sam Altman, and others are working to transform it into a traditional for-profit company,” with talks taking place “for a new round of investment that could value the company at as much as $150 billion, a huge leap from its last round at $80 billion,” explains NYT

The Wall Street Journal writes that “becoming a for-profit would be a seismic shift for OpenAI, which was founded in 2015 to develop AI technology ‘to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return,’ according to a statement it published when it launched.”

The new plan is to transition to “a public benefit corporation,” according to WSJ, which says it will continue to maintain a non-profit division. Under the new charter, Altman “would also own a stake in the for-profit company,” something he “hasn’t previously owned.”

NYT notes that “OpenAI is now controlled by the board of a non-profit organization that Mr. Altman and his co-founders created in late 2015 to oversee the start-up’s technologies.”

Those technologies now include ChatGPT Advanced Voice Mode, which means individual ChatGPT Plus users and “small enterprise teams for Teams can use the chatbot by speaking to it instead of typing a prompt,” writes VentureBeat, referencing an “AI voice chat race” that sees companies including Apple and Amazon striving “to make the generative AI chat experience more humanlike.”

ZDNet explains the new Advanced Voice Mode offers users “a smarter voice assistant that can be interrupted and respond to their emotions,” listing the five new voices: Arbor, Maple, Sol, Spruce and Vale.