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OpenAI

OpenAI kicked off an AI revolution with DALL-E and ChatGPT, making the organization the epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom. Led by CEO Sam Altman, OpenAI became a story unto itself when Altman was briefly fired and then brought back after pressure from staff and Microsoft, an investor and close partner.

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Hayden Field
Thinking Machines Lab is partnering with Nvidia.

The AI startup, founded by ex-OpenAI executive Mira Murati, will team up with Nvidia on a “long-term gigawatt scale strategic partnership” to power TML’s AI model training. The news comes after multiple founding members of the startup left for OpenAI at the same time earlier this year.

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Hayden Field
OpenAI will acquire Promptfoo, an AI security platform.

The tool, which OpenAI said is used by 25 percent of Fortune 500 companies, helps “identify and remediate vulnerabilities in AI systems during development.”

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Dominic Preston
I’m getting a girlfriend in the next patch.

ChatGPT’s long-promised “adult mode” is still on the way, but will miss its planned Q1 launch. For some, that means the long, lonely wait continues.

pretendworld:

reading the news that your new girlfriend has been delayed must be just brutal

Get the day’s best comment and more in my free newsletter, The Verge Daily.

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Terrence O'Brien
DOGE used ChatGPT to gut the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Elon Musk’s short-lived agency rolled into the NEH with the mandate to cancel grants that it deemed contrary to Donald Trump’s anti-DEI agenda. According to the New York Times, decisions about which grants to cancel weren’t made after careful analysis and deliberation. Instead, they were made with a ChatGPT prompt.

… instead of looking closely at funded projects, they pulled short summaries off the internet and fed them into the A.I. chatbot.

The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.

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Terrence O'Brien
OpenAI’s head of robotics quit over the company’s Pentagon deal.

Caitlin Kalinowski posted on X that she resigned from OpenAI, saying the company’s contract didn’t do enough to protect Americans from warrantless surveillance and that granting AI “lethal autonomy without human authorization” was a line that “deserved more deliberation.”

Post from Caitlin Kalinowski, now former head of robotics at OpenAI reading, “I resigned from OpenAI. I care deeply about the Robotics team and the work we built together. This wasn’t an easy call. AI has an important role in national security. But surveillance of Americans without judicial oversight and lethal autonomy without human authorization are lines that deserved more deliberation than they got. This was about principle, not people. I have deep respect for Sam and the team, and I’m proud of what we built together.”
Screenshot: The Verge
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Jay Peters
OpenAI is delaying ChatGPT’s “adult mode.”

The feature was expected to launch sometime this quarter, but an OpenAI spokesperson tells former Verge staffer Alex Heath that “We’re pushing out the launch of adult mode so we can focus on work that is a higher priority for more users right now, including gains in intelligence, personality improvements, personalization, and making the experience more proactive.”

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Stevie Bonifield
OpenAI’s Codex updates focus on security and open source.

OpenAI just launched Codex Security, a new research preview AI agent focused on identifying and fixing app security issues. Separately, it announced the Codex Open Source Fund is also now including “conditional access” to Codex Security as part of the six-month ChatGPT Pro with Codex subscriptions it’s offering open source developers.

The AI Doc is an overwrought hype piece for doomers and accelerationists alike

Focus Features’ new documentary about gen AI suffers from having too much access and not enough thought.

Charles Pulliam-Moore
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Thomas Ricker
OpenAI is developing a GitHub rival.

Prompted by recent GitHub outages, OpenAI is in the early stages of developing its own code repository, with completion still months away. The company is considering making it available to OpenAI customers, putting the ChatGPT creator in direct competition with Microsoft, a company holding a significant stake in OpenAI.

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Richard Lawler
OpenAI says ChatGPT’s new update adds more context to search results.

The new GPT-5.3-Instant model rolling out today is supposed to be more accurate, understand the context of questions, and “reduces unnecessary dead ends, caveats, and overly declarative phrasing that can interrupt the flow of
conversation.”

Does that mean the return of 4o’s glaze? Maybe not, but a blog post says 5.2-Instant’s tendency toward “coming across as overbearing or making unwarranted assumptions about user intent or emotions” has been addressed.

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Hayden Field
Protesters plan to gather outside OpenAI’s offices today to protest its Pentagon deal.

The protest’s planned focus is AI-powered mass domestic surveillance and lethal autonomous weapons. It’s organized by QuitGPT, a grassroots campaign that says it’s inspired more than 1.5 million people have to take relevant action (by either sharing on social media or signing up for the boycott itself).

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Hayden Field
Sam Altman said he planned to add two sentences to OpenAI’s agreement with the Pentagon.

The OpenAI CEO laid out some updated wording he hoped would address people’s concerns about mass domestic surveillance, though the new language still included the phrase “consistent with applicable laws.” Altman also said he reiterated over the weekend that Anthropic should not be designated a supply chain risk.

Sam Altman’s post

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How OpenAI caved to the Pentagon on AI surveillance

The law doesn’t say what Sam Altman claims it does.

Hayden Field
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Hayden Field
OpenAI reached a new agreement with the Pentagon.

CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that the agreement allowed the US military to “deploy our models in their classified network.” He said the agreement reflects OpenAI’s desire for prohibitions on domestic mass surveillance and “human responsibility for the use of force, including for autonomous weapon systems.” Altman also wrote that OpenAI is “asking the DoW to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept.” This follows a rollercoaster week of negotiations between Anthropic and the Pentagon.

Sam Altman’s post

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Hayden Field
Even Ilya Sutskever weighed in on the Anthropic-Pentagon situation.

The OpenAI co-founder, who left after CEO Sam Altman’s ouster and reinstatement and then started his own AI startup called Safe Superintelligence, posted on X:

It’s extremely good that Anthropic has not backed down, and it’s siginficant that OpenAI has taken a similar stance.

In the future, there will be much more challenging situations of this nature, and it will be critical for the relevant leaders to rise up to the occasion, for fierce competitors to put their differences aside. Good to see that happen today.

We don’t have to have unsupervised killer robots

AI companies could stand together to draw red lines on military AI — why aren’t they?

Hayden Field
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Thomas Ricker
OpenAI would have alerted police to Canadian shooter if account was discovered today.

That’s the takeaway from Altman and Co’s new safety protocols that govern when to involve law enforcement. The changes come after a fatal shooting at a school in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia. this month that killed eight and left dozens injured.

The suspect’s interactions with ChatGPT suggested the possibility of real-world violence and led OpenAI to shut down the account, but not notify police.

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Hayden Field
OpenAI has a new chief people officer.

Arvind KC, who was formerly Roblox’s chief people and systems officer, has also held senior roles at Google, Palantir, and Meta, according to OpenAI. He replaces the company’s former chief people officer, Julia Villagra, who departed in August 2025 after less than six months in the role. The post had since been vacant.

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Emma Roth
OpenAI’s Stargate struggles.

The Information reports on OpenAI’s rocky $500 billion partnership with Oracle and SoftBank, which “has not staffed up and is not developing any of OpenAI’s data centers.”

OpenAI reportedly explored building its own data centers as the three companies disagreed over their roles, but the high costs have led the AI giant to strike individual deals with SoftBank and Oracle instead.

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Jay Peters
Nvidia and OpenAI might be getting close to a new, major investment deal.

After a previously-announced $100 billion deal went “on ice,” as The Wall Street Journal reported, Nvidia is nearing a $30 billion equity investment as part of a larger funding round, the Financial Times reports. The investment might be tied up as soon as this weekend.

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Jay Peters
ChatGPT ads in the wild.

Adthena, an “AI search intelligence” platform, has spotted ads in ChatGPT, and they can apparently trigger as soon as after your first prompt.

Ads from Expedia, Qualcomm, Best Buy, and Enterprise Mobility are starting to show up in ChatGPT responses, OpenAI told Adweek.

This is a screenshot from a whole slideshow about the ChatGPT ads on Adthena’s LinkedIn page.
This is a screenshot from a whole slideshow about the ChatGPT ads on Adthena’s LinkedIn page.
Image: Adthena
Money no longer matters to AI’s top talent
Play

The AI industry is rife with defections, FOMO, and radical mission statements. It’s about to get supercharged.

Nilay Patel
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Emma Roth
OpenAI hires away Instagram’s VP of global partnerships.

Charles Porch, who helped land Instagram’s biggest partnerships — including the launch of Beyoncé’s self-titled album on the social network — will now serve as OpenAI’s first VP of global creative partnerships.

“I’m going to be the person that’s talking to creative communities around the world to figure out how we build the best products to serve them,” Porch tells Vanity Fair.

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Charles Pulliam-Moore
Is “apocaloptimist” the new word for AI hype man?

Focus Features is billing The AI Doc: Or How I Became An Apocaloptimist as an “eye-opening” exploration of “the most powerful technology humanity has ever created.” You’d think the doc might feature some critical voices, but its new trailer makes it feel like it might be one big commercial. The film premieres on March 27th.

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Jay Peters
ChatGPT is getting a Lockdown Mode.

Lockdown Mode is “not necessary” for most people and “tightly constrains how ChatGPT can interact with external systems to reduce the risk of prompt injection–based data exfiltration,” according to OpenAI.

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Emma Roth
Ex-OpenAI researcher has “deep reservations” about its approach to ads.

In an op-ed for The New York Times, Zoë Hitzig, a researcher who left OpenAI this week, expresses concerns about the company’s move to put ads in ChatGPT, while posing alternatives to a setup that could potentially harm users down the line:

So the real question is not ads or no ads. It is whether we can design structures that avoid both excluding people from using these tools, and potentially manipulating them as consumers. I think we can.

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Hayden Field
OpenAI reportedly disbanded its Mission Alignment team.

Members of the team — which was tasked with ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity — have been transferred to other areas of the company, and former team lead Joshua Achiam will take on a new role as OpenAI’s “chief futurist,” Platformer reported.