When the board of OpenAI suddenly fired the company’s CEO last month, it sparked speculation that board members were rattled by the breakneck pace of progress in artificial intelligence and the possible risks of seeking to commercialize the technology too quickly. Robust Intelligence, a startup founded in 2020 to develop …
Read More »How to Stop Another OpenAI Meltdown
OpenAI needs open-heart surgery. The ChatGPT developer’s new board of directors and its briefly fired but now-restored CEO, Sam Altman, said last week that they’re trying to fix the unusual corporate structure that allowed four board members to trigger a near-death experience for the company. The startup was founded in …
Read More »OpenAI Agreed to Buy $51 Million of AI Chips From a Startup Backed by CEO Sam Altman
Sam Altman was reinstated as OpenAI CEO last month soon after being fired, but had the company continued to develop ChatGPT without him, he still would have stood to gain. During Altman’s tenure as CEO, OpenAI had signed a letter of intent to spend $51 million on AI chips from …
Read More »These Clues Hint at the True Nature of OpenAI’s Shadowy Q* Project
Last week, after briefly deposed CEO Sam Altman was reinstalled at OpenAI, two reports claimed that a top-secret project at the company had rattled some researchers there with its potential to solve intractable problems in a powerful new way. “Given vast computing resources, the new model was able to solve …
Read More »The Year of ChatGPT and Living Generatively
No human celebrating a first birthday is as verbose, knowledgeable, or prone to fabrication as ChatGPT, which is blowing out its first candle as I type these words. Of course, OpenAI’s game-changing large language model was precocious at birth, tumbling into civilization’s ongoing conversation like an uninvited guest busting into …
Read More »OpenAI’s Custom Chatbots Are Leaking Their Secrets
You don’t need to know how to code to create your own AI chatbot. Since the start of November—shortly before the chaos at the company unfolded—OpenAI has let anyone build and publish their own custom versions of ChatGPT, known as “GPTs”. Thousands have been created: A “nomad” GPT gives advice …
Read More »Amazon’s Answer to ChatGPT Is a Workplace Assistant Called Q
Amazon might not have built ChatGPT, but it doesn’t seem likely to suddenly fire and then rehire its CEO either, as OpenAI did this month. As of today, Amazon does have its own AI helper—a new chatbot for Amazon Web Services named, of all things, Q. Amazon Q is a …
Read More »Sam Altman’s Second Coming Sparks New Fears of the AI Apocalypse
Open AI’s new boss is the same as the old boss. But the company—and the artificial intelligence industry—may have been profoundly changed by the past five days of high-stakes soap opera. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, cofounder, and figurehead, was removed by the board of directors on Friday. By Tuesday night, …
Read More »Mods Are Asleep. Quick, Everyone Release AI Products
The turmoil at OpenAI over the past five days has captivated the tech industry and kept entrepreneurs, journalists, and anyone who still has an X account glued to their timelines for the latest emoji updates and lower-case missives. In the meantime, some of the most prominent AI companies—including OpenAI—continued to …
Read More »OpenAI’s Boardroom Drama Could Mess Up Your Future
In June I had a conversation with chief scientist Ilya Sutskever at OpenAI’s headquarters, as I reported WIRED’s October cover story. Among the topics we discussed was the unusual structure of the company.OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab whose mission was to develop artificial intelligence on par or beyond …
Read More »