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. Continue reading OpenAI Rolls Out Advanced Voice Mode Feature for ChatGPT

The OpenAI board’s Safety and Security Committee will become an independent board oversight committee, chaired by Zico Kolter, machine learning department chair at Carnegie Mellon University. The committee will be responsible for “the safety and security processes guiding OpenAI’s model deployment and development.” Three OpenAI board members segue from their current SSC roles to the new committee: Quora founder Adam D’Angelo, former Sony Corporation EVP Nicole Seligman and erstwhile NSA chief Paul Nakasone. OpenAI is currently putting together a new funding round that reportedly aims to value the company at $150 billion. Continue reading OpenAI Bestows Independent Oversight on Safety Committee

OpenAI co-founder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, who exited the company in May after a power struggle with CEO Sam Altman, has raised $1 billion for his new venture, Safe Superintelligence (SSI). The cash infusion from major Silicon Valley venture capital firms including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, DST Global, SV Angel and NFDG has resulted in a $5 billion valuation for the startup. As its name implies, SSI is focused on developing artificial intelligence that does not pose a threat to humanity, a goal that will be pursued “in a straight shot” with “one product,” Sutskever has stated. Continue reading Safe Superintelligence Raises $1 Billion to Develop Ethical AI

San Francisco-based OpenAI revealed it is currently testing SearchGPT, a prototype of new AI search features that provides “fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources.” The testing arrives as similar technology is made available by leading search services Google and Microsoft Bing. The SearchGPT prototype, featuring a user interface similar to that of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot and virtual assistant, launched last week to a group of 10,000 test users and publishers who will be tapped for feedback. The plan is to iterate an improved version and then integrate SearchGPT directly into ChatGPT, although no timeline was provided. Continue reading OpenAI Begins Testing Prototype of New AI Search Features

Ilya Sutskever — who last month exited his post as chief scientist at OpenAI after a highly publicized power struggle with CEO Sam Altman — has launched a new AI company, Safe Superintelligence Inc. Sutskever’s partners in the new venture are his former OpenAI colleague Daniel Levy and Daniel Gross, who founded the AI startup Cue, which was acquired by Apple where Gross continued in an AI leadership role. “Building safe superintelligence (SSI) is the most important technical problem of our​​ time,” the trio posted on the company’s one-page website, stating its goal is to “scale in peace.” Continue reading Sutskever Targets Safe Superintelligence with New Company

OpenAI has begun training a new flagship artificial intelligence model to succeed GPT-4, the technology currently associated with ChatGPT. The new model — which some are already calling GPT-5, although OpenAI hasn’t yet shared its name — is expected to take the company’s compute to the next level as it works toward artificial general intelligence (AGI), intelligence equal to or surpassing human cognitive abilities. The company also announced it has formed a new Safety and Security Committee two weeks after dissolving the old one upon the departure of OpenAI co-founder and Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever. Continue reading OpenAI Is Working on New Frontier Model to Succeed GPT-4

Maven is a new social network launched by OpenAI and Twitter alums designed to remove the pressure to amass followers and reinfuse a sense of serendipitous exploration, emphasized in its tagline: “Follow interests, not influencers.” Abandoning what it calls the “popularity-contest style” of most platforms, Maven doesn’t include likes, and lets people follow “interests” instead of other accounts. Its founders built Maven’s algorithm by drawing on the principles of open-ended systems. Its goals include increasing the probability of serendipity while addressing users’ curiosity, thus upping the odds of “meeting people with complementary interests.” Continue reading New Social Network Maven Favors Serendipity Over Followers

OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announced during a live-streamed event today that the company is launching an updated version of its GPT-4 model that powers OpenAI’s popular chatbot. The new flagship AI model, GPT-4o is reportedly “much faster” and offers improved text, voice and vision capabilities. Murati said GPT-4o will be free to all users, while Plus users will enjoy “up to five times the capacity limits” available to free users. According to OpenAI, the new AI model “can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds, which is similar to human response time in a conversation.” Continue reading OpenAI Unveils Faster AI Model, Desktop Version of ChatGPT

Microsoft and OpenAI are contemplating an AI supercomputer data center that may cost as much as $100 billion. Called Stargate, the aim would be to have it operational by 2008 to drive OpenAI’s next generation of artificial intelligence. According to reports, the Stargate complex would span hundreds of U.S. acres and use up to 5 gigawatts of power, which is massive (the equivalent of a substantial metropolitan power grid). In light of those power needs, a nuclear power source is said to be under consideration. The project is not yet green-lit, and no U.S. location has been selected. Continue reading Microsoft, OpenAI Considering a Supercomputer Data Center

Nvidia unveiled what it is calling the world’s most powerful AI processing system, the Blackwell GPU, purpose built to power real-time generative AI on trillion-parameter large language models at what the company says will be up to 25x less cost and energy consumption than its predecessors. Blackwell’s capabilities will usher in what the company promises will be a new era in generative AI computing. News from Nvidia’s GTC 2024 developer conference included the NIM software platform, purpose built to streamline the setup of custom and pre-trained AI models in a production environment, and the DGX SuperPOD server, powered by Blackwell. Continue reading GTC: Nvidia Unveils Blackwell GPU for Trillion-Parameter LLMs

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ongoing effort to fund a new initiative to produce chips to power artificial intelligence has graduated from a billion-dollar venture to a trillion dollar undertaking that aims at nothing less than “to reshape the business of chips and AI,” per recent reports. The United Arab Emirates has joined the list of sources of potential funding for the global project, which seeks to remedy the tight supply of AI chips that Altman is said to view as an obstacle to OpenAI’s effort to develop artificial general intelligence, which he defines as “systems that are generally smarter than humans.” Continue reading Sam Altman Is Reportedly Seeking ‘Trillions’ to Fund AI Chips

As parents and educators grapple with figuring out how AI will fit into education, OpenAI is preemptively acting to help answer that question, teaming with learning and child safety group Common Sense Media on informational material and recommended guidelines. The two will also work together to curate “family-friendly GPTs” for the GPT Store that are “based on Common Sense ratings and standards,” the organization said. The partnership aims “to help realize the full potential of AI for teens and families and minimize the risks,” according to Common Sense. Continue reading OpenAI Partners with Common Sense Media on AI Guidelines

The Federal Trade Commission has opened an investigation into Big Tech’s artificial intelligence arms race. Specifically, the agency has ordered five companies to provide information under what it calls a “6(b) inquiry,” targeting Amazon and Google’s strategic alliance with Anthropic, and Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI. The scrutiny aims “to build a better internal understanding of these relationships and their impact on the competitive landscape.” In other words, the government does not want another free for all, along the lines of social media’s growth, which saw big players acquire startups competing in the space. Continue reading FTC Is Investigating AI Investments by Major Tech Companies

Further insights into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s global fundraising effort for a multi-billion dollar computer chip venture now appears to be toward a goal establishing a network of semiconductor plants to manufacture AI chips, according to media reports. The plan would see the 38-year-old entering a hotly competitive yet underserved field, dominated by Nvidia and increasingly Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Apparently, he feels the existing players aren’t set up to produce the amount of chips required to meet the goals of OpenAI and others through 2030, now that many businesses incorporate AI into workflows and consumer products. Continue reading Altman Is Seeking Billions in Global Funding for AI Chip Plants

In a Threads post last week, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company’s new frontier is open-source artificial general intelligence (AGI). Meta has united its FAIR and GenAI research teams behind the goal of developing such a platform, which Zuckerberg described as part of the company’s “long-term vision.” “The next generation of services required is building full general intelligence, building the best AI assistants, AIs for creators, AIs for businesses and more,” Zuckerberg said, explaining that will require “advances in every area of AI from reasoning to planning to coding to memory and other cognitive abilities.” Continue reading Meta Combines Research Units to Develop Open-Source AGI