OpenAI

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:

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.

Ryan Beiermeister, previously vice president of the product policy team, was reportedly fired in early January over alleged sexual discrimination against a male colleague. Beiermeister, who called the allegation “absolutely false,” had opposed adding adult content, and worried safeguards weren’t strong enough. OpenAI said her firing was “not related to any issue she raised.”

We’d heard its devices could arrive this year, but in a court filing OpenAI vice president Peter Welinder said they won’t reach customers before March 2027.

The round of Big Game ads Anthropic previewed earlier this week set Sam Altman off, as he called them “clearly dishonest.”

As OpenAI and Anthropic feud over AI advertising, both companies are running Super Bowl ads for their AI products. After OpenAI boss Sam Altman said its ad would focus on “builders,” OpenAI debuted this ad about its AI coding agent, Codex.

GPT‑5.3‑Codex, its new coding and development model, is apparently the first “that was instrumental in creating itself.” No, that probably doesn’t mean ChatGPT is ready to build its own Skynet, but it can help in debugging and testing:

ChatGPT users who create designs via the Canva app can now connect to their Canva Brand Kits, allowing designs to draw from on-brand colors and assets. Anthropic’s good week continues, however — Claude got the same Canva Brand Kit feature first.

“Ads are coming to AI. But not to Claude,” is a clear shot at OpenAI’s decision to bring ads to ChatGPT without mentioning it by name. There are four commercials in the campaign, with one trimmed to thirty-seconds to air during the Super Bowl at a cost of around $8 million.

OpenAI’s new “head of preparedness,” Dylan Scandinaro, came from an AGI safety role at the company’s chief competitor. “AI is advancing rapidly,” he wrote in a post on X. “The potential benefits are great—and so are the risks of extreme and even irrecoverable harm. There’s a lot of work to do, and not much time to do it!”

In the middle of a Forbes profile of Altman’s journey through the AI world — which is just astoundingly chaotic, when you see it all laid out in a row — Altman says that “we basically have built AGI, or very close to it.” Which, uh, okay! But then he changes his mind, sort of. From the story:

Disney’s deal with OpenAI includes a plan to allow Sora users to create 30-second clips featuring over 250 Disney characters while some will appear in curated vertical video feeds inside Disney Plus, CEO Bob Iger told investors on Monday. Iger said the feature could arrive “sometime in fiscal 2026,” adding the company hopes to allow Disney Plus subscribers to create them directly on its platform:

The deal, announced in September, is “on ice,” according to The Wall Street Journal, though there are apparently still talks about a deal of some kind:

After the launch of GPT-5, OpenAI brought GPT-4o back for paid subscribers because users missed it, but now, “only 0.1% of users” are still choosing GPT‑4o “each day,” the company says.

An update coming today also introduces an “auto” mode that switches between ChatGPT’s responses and Google Search results based on your query. OpenAI is also working on Windows support and a mobile version of the browser.

OpenAI’s CFO said the other day that the company’s aim for the year is “practical adoption,” but one commenter wonders if the ChatGPT company might have something more straightforward in mind.

OpenAI announced it’s rolling out a new paid tier in the US, ChatGPT Go, just as it confirms that ads are coming “soon” — including to paid Go users. As sales pitches go, it’s not the best we’ve ever heard.