Category Archives: AI

Sam Altman Says “Open AI Is Not For Sale”

AI

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told employees in a memo on Tuesday that the company hasn’t received “anything official” from Elon Musk regarding a potential purchase of the artificial intelligence startup, CNBC reported.

“Our structure exists to ensure that no individual can take control of OpenAI,” Altman wrote, in the memo that was obtained by CNBC. “Elon runs a competitive AI company, and his actions are not about OpenAI’s mission or values. They are tactics aimed at weakening us because we’re making great progress.”

The note comes a day after news surfaced that Musk is leading a group of investors in trying to buy control of OpenAI for $98.4 billion. The offer is for the nonprofit that oversees the AI startup behind ChatGPT, and Musk’s attorney Marc Toberoff said he submitted on Monday,

“It’s time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Toberoff told CNBC in a statement.

Altman and Musk are in the midst of a heated legal and public debate relations battle over the future of OpenAI. They were two of the co-founders of OpenAI in 2025, establishing the entity as a nonprofit focused on AI research. Musk is suing OpenAI, accusing it of antitrust violations and to try and keep it from converting into a for-profit corporation.

TechCrunch reported: In an interview at the AI Action Summit in Paris on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman dismissed Elon Musk’s unsolicited $97.4 billion bid for OpenAI’s nonprofit as “an attempt to slow OpenAI down.”

“Musk is obviously is a competitor,” Altman said. “He’s raised a lot of money for his AI company xAI, and they’re trying to compete with us from a technological perspective.”

Altman went on to quip, “I think Musk’s whole life is from a position of insecurity … I don’t think he’s a happy person.”

BBC reported: The chief executive of ChatGPT-owner OpenAI says it’s “not for sale” after a $97.4bn  (£78.4bn) takeover bid from a consortium of investors led by Elon Musk.

Sam Altman, who co-founded OpenAI with Musk before a public falling out led to Musk’s departure, was speaking at the AI Action Summit in Paris.

“We are an unusual organization and we have this mission of making AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefit all of humanity and we are here to do that,” Altman said in an on-stage interview.

When asked to define AGI, Altman said “most people use it to mean, like, really strong, powerful AI systems.”

Unlike many tech giants, such as Meta or Microsoft, OpenAI is not a publicly traded company.

Instead, it has a complicated structure which involves a partnership between non-profit and for-profit arms. 

Altman has suggested Musk was “a competitor who is not able to beat us in the market and you know, instead, is just trying to say, like, “I’m gonna buy this” with total disregard for the mission.” 

OpenAI Unveils A New ChatGPT Agent For “Deep Research”

AI, OpenAI

OpenAI is announcing a new AI “agent” designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform, TechCrunch reported.

Appropriately enough, it’s called deep research.

OpenAI said in a blog post published Sunday that this new capability was designed for “people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, policy, and engineering and need thorough, precise, and reliable research.” It could also be useful, the company added, for anyone making “purchases that typically require careful research, like cars, appliances, and furniture.”

Basically, ChatGPT deep research is intended for instances where you don’t just want a quick answer or summary, but instead need to assiduously consider information from multiple websites and other sources.

The big question is, just how precise is ChatGPT deep research? AI is imperfect, after all. It’s prone to hallucinations and other types of errors that could be particularly harmful in a “deep research” scenario. That’s perhaps why OpenAI said every ChatGPT deep research output will be “fully documented, with clear citations and a summary of the thinking, making it easy to reference and verify the information.”

OpenAI reported: Today we’re launching deep research in ChatGPT, a new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research for complex tasks. It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.

Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently — you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst. Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimized for web browsing and data analysis, it leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet, pivoting as needed in relation to information it encounters.

The ability to synthesize knowledge is a prerequisite for creating new knowledge. For this reason, deep research marks a significant step toward our broader goal of developing AGI, which we have long envisioned as capable of producing novel scientific research.

Engadget posted: There’s no two ways about it, there’s a newfound sense of urgency at OpenAI. Two days after releasing o3-mini to the world, the company made a surprise announcement on Sunday evening, revealing Deep Research. The new feature allows ChatGPT to find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of websites and online sources to create reports “at the level of a research analyst.”

On top of the usual text questions, users can upload files, including PDFs and spreadsheets, when prompting ChatGPT in this way. The chatbot will then take “anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes” to complete an answer, a side panel documenting the agents progress and citations as it works.

In my opinion, I can see why some people want to use the capabilities of OpenAI. That said, I have concerns about the AI creating “hallucinations”.

Joe Biden Signs Executive Order To Speed Up AI Data Center Construction

AI

President Biden issued an executive order today aimed at speeding the development of AI data centers in the U.S, The Verge reported.

It directs the Department of Defense (DOD) and Department of Energy (DOE) to lease federal sites to private companies building gigawatt-scale AI data centers and clean power facilities. It also tells federal agencies to “prioritize” and speed up permitting of AI infrastructure. The measure could create “categorical exclusions” to speed environmental review under the National Environmental Protection Act.

Developing new AI tools is an increasingly energy-hungry endeavor. Nevertheless, the Biden Administration seems to think it’s worth the risk of further derailing US climate goals and putting additional pressure on already stressed power grids.

“We will not let America be out-built when it come to the technology that will define the future,” Joe Biden said in a statement today.

Prior to the announcement today — in response to reports that the White House was considering measures to fast track data center development — environmental and consumer advocacy groups as well as Democratic lawmakers had urged the White House to avoid exempting AI from typical permitting procedures and environmental standards.

CNBC reported President Joe Biden issued an executive order Thursday aimed at speeding up domestic construction of artificial intelligence infrastructure and shoring up the national security risk involved in the technology.

The move empowers the U.S. Department of Defense and Department of Energy to lease federal sites for gigawatt-scale AI data centers.

“AI is poised to have large effects across our economy, including in health care, transportation, education, and beyond, and it’s too important to be offshored,” the White House said in a release.

The order also issued guidelines for AI developers using sites to not only build, operate and painting the leased centers at full cost, but also to deliver clean energy resources to match their capacity needs to prevent increases in electricity costs.

Companies leasing the federal lands will also be required to purchase an “appropriate share” of U.S.-manufactured semiconductors and to pay workers “prevailing wages,” according to the release. After the agencies select the sites, developers can submit lease proposals. 

The Mercury News reported President Joe Biden on Tuesday signed an ambitious executive order on artificial intelligence that seeks to ensure the infrastructure needed for advanced AI operations, such as large-scale data centers and new clean power facilities, can be built quickly and at scale in the United States.

The executive order directs federal agencies to accelerate large-scale AI infrastructure development at government sites, while imposing requirements and safeguards on the developers on those locations. It also directs certain agencies to make federal sites available for AI data centers and new clean power facilities.

OpenAI Unveils o3 and o3-Mini Trained To “Think” Before Responding

AI

OpenAI saved its biggest announcement for the last day of its 12-day “shipmas” event, TechCrunch reported.

On Friday, the company unveiled o3, the successor to the o1 “reasoning” model it released earlier in the year. O3 is a model family, to be more precise — as was the case with o1. There’s o3 and o3-mini, a smaller, distilled model fine-tuned for particular tasks.

OpenAI makes the remarkable claim that o3, at least in certain conditions, approached AGI — with significant caveats.

Why call the new model o3, not o2? Well, trademarks may be to blame. According to The Information, OpenAI skipped o2 to avoid a potential conflict with British telecom provider O2. Sam Altman somewhat confirmed this during a livestream this morning. 

Neither o3 nor o3-mini are widely available yet, but safety researchers can sign up for a preview for o3-mini starting today. An o3 preview will arrive sometime after; OpenAI didn’t specify when. Altman said that the plan is to launch o3-mini toward the end of January.

NBC News reported: OpenAI’s “12 days of Shipmas” which wrapped up on Friday, brought a sense of levity to end the year. The marketing blitz served as a way for the high-profile and controversial AI startup to show it can release an extensive roster of new features and tools while also having fun.

But when the calendar turns, the company faces some serious challenges. Most notably, there’s co-founder Elon Musk, who now runs rival startup xAI, and is in the midst of a heated legal battle with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that could have a big impact on the company’s future.

The threat Musk poses to OpenAI is even more significant considering the hefty amount of influence the world’s richest person is poised to assume as part of the incoming Trump administration.

The pressure on OpenAI is tied in large part to its $157 billion valuation, achieved in the two years since the company launched its viral chatbot, ChatGPT, and kicked off the boom in generative AI.

ArsTechnica reported: Sam Altman announced its latest AI “reasoning” models, o3 and o3-mini, which build upon the o1 models launched earlier this year. The company is not releasing them yet but will make this models available for public safety testing and research access today.

The models use what OpenAI calls “private chain of thought,” where the model pauses to examine its internal dialogue and plan ahead before responding, which you might call “simulated reasoning” (SR) – a form of AI that goes beyond basic large language models (LLMs).

The o3-mini variant, also announced Friday, includes an adaptive thinking time feature, offering low, medium, and high processing speeds. The company states that higher compute settings produce better results. OpenAI reports that o3-mini outperforms its predecessor, o1, on the Codeforces benchmark.

In my opinion, it sounds like OpenAI o3 and o3-mini are likely to become the next generation of AI models.

Meta’s AI Video Editing Features Are Coming To Instagram Next Year

AI, Meta

Earlier this year, Meta previewed Movie Gen, an AI video tool that looked impressively realistic (at least in the sample clips it released.) At the time, though, Meta said it was still a research project with no immediate plans to make the features available to users, Engadget reported.

But now it seems that Movie Gen could arrive on Instagram sooner than later. Instagram’s top exec Adam Mosseri posted a short video previewing the kind of seamless AI edits that will eventually be possible, saying that the company is “hoping to bring this to Instagram next year.”

In the clip, Mosseri says that Meta is “working on some really exciting AI tools” for video creators. “You should be able to do anything you want with your videos,” he says. “You should be able to change your outfit, or change the context in which you’re sitting, or add a chain — whatever you can think of.”

The Verge reported: Instagram is planning to introduce a generative AI editing feature next year that will allow users to “change nearly any aspect of your videos.” 

The tech is powered by Meta’s Movie Gen AI model according to a teaser posted by Instagram head Adam Mosseri, and aimed to provide creators with more tools to help transform their content and bring their ideas to life without extensive video editing or manipulation skills.

Mosseri says the feature can make adjustments using a “simple text prompt.” The announcement video includes previews of early research AI models that change Mosseri’s outfit, background environments, and even his overall appearance — in one scene transforming him into a felt puppet.

Meta unveiled its Movie Gen AI video generator in October, which promises to “preserve human identity and motion” in the videos it creates or edits. The announcement was made months after similar models from competitors like OpenAI’s Sora and Adobe Firefly Video model, the latter of which is already powering beta text-to-video editing tools inside Premier Pro. 

Gizmodo reported: One common complaint about Instagram, and social media in general, is that it breeds insecurity by presenting an unrealistic impression of other people’s lives as being better than they really are — the best moments only. 

And heavy editing of physical appearances is known to contribute to body dissatisfaction even when people know what they are seeing is not the full picture. Instagram is soon going to make that situation somewhat worse by allowing users to completely transform their videos using generative AI.

In a teaser shared by Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, was able to completely transform his appearance, in one shot turning himself into a felt puppet, and in another transporting Mosserri from his office to a snowy mountain range with a furry coat. In another, he was able to place a hippo behind him that jumps around and looked into the camera.

In my opinion, I think that Meta’s Movie Gen AI model might make some people who see it feel inadequate about their bodies, and will not want to put up videos of themselves.

OpenAI Launches ChatGPT Search Competing With Google Search

AI

OpenAI on Thursday launched a search feature within ChatGPT, its viral chatbot, that positions the high-powered artificial intelligence startup to better compete with search engines like Google, Microsoft’s Bing and Perplexity, CNBC reported.

ChatGPT search offers up-to-the-minute sports scores, stock quotes, news, weather and more, powered by real-time web search and partnerships with news and data providers, according to the company. It began beta-testing the search engine, called SearchGPT, in July.

The release could have implications for Google as the dominant search engine. Since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, Alphabet investors have been concerned that OpenAI could take market share from Google in search by giving consumers new ways to seek information online.

Shares of Alphabet were down about 1% following the news.

The move also positions OpenAI as more of a competitor to Microsoft and it’s businesses. Microsoft has invested close to $14 billion in OpenAI, yet OpenAI’s products directly compete with Microsoft’s AI and search tools, such as Copilot and Bing.

The Verge reported ChatGPT is officially an AI-powered web search engine. The company is enabling real-time information in conversations for paid subscribers today (along with SearchGPT waitlist users), with free, enterprise, and education users gaining access in the coming weeks.

Rather than launching a separate product, web search will be integrated into ChatGPT’s existing interface. The feature determines when to tap into web results based on queries, through users can also manually trigger web searches. ChatGPT’s web search integration finally closes a key competitive gap with rivals like Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini, which have long offered real-time internet access in their AI conversations.

The new search functionality will be available across all ChatGPT platforms: iOS, Android, and desktop apps for macOS and Windows. The search functionality was built with “a mix of search technologies,” including Microsoft’s Bing. The company wrote in a blog on Thursday that the underlying search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o.

ArsTechnica reported: One of the biggest bummers about the modern internet has been the decline of Google Search. Once an essential part of using the web, it’s now a shadow of its former self, full of SEO-fueled junk and AI-generated spam.

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a new feature of ChatGPT that could potentially replace Google Search for some people: an upgraded web search capability for its AI assistant that provides answers with source attribution during conversations. The feature, officially called “ChatGPT with Search,” makes web search automatic based on user questions, with an option to manually trigger searches through a new web search icon.

In my opinion, it sounds like OpenAI is enabling users to more easily connect with ChatGPT in order to find the information they are looking for. It sounds like a competitor to Google Search.

Meta Builds AI Search Engine To Cut Google, Bing Reliance

AI, Meta

Meta Platforms is working on an artificial intelligence-based search engine as it looks to reduce dependance on Alphabet’s Google and Microsoft’s Bing, the Information reported on Monday, Reuters reported.

The AI search engine segment is heating up with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Google and Microsoft all vying for dominance in the rapidly evolving market.

Meta’s web crawler will provide conversational answers to users about current events on Meta AI, the company’s chatbot on WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook, according to the report, which cited a person involved with the strategy.

The Facebook-owner currently relies on Google and Bing search engines to give users answers on news, stocks and sports.

Meta did not immediately respond to a Reuters request from comment.

Google is aggressively integrating its latest and most powerful AI model, Gemini, into core products like Search, aiming to deliver more conversational and intuitive search experiences.

Open AI relies on its largest investor, Microsoft, for web access to answer topical queries, using its Bing search engine.

Engadget reported: Stung from the hit it took from an Apple privacy feature three years ago, Meta is reportedly looking to decrease its dependence on Google and Microsoft. The Information said on Monday that Meta is developing a search engine for its chatbot. The company also partnered with Reuters to help its AI answer news-related questions.

Meta has reportedly been working on indexing the web for at least eight months. The company’s goal is said to be to integrate the indexes into Meta AI, giving the chatbot an alternative to Google Search and Microsoft Bing.

Meta publicly disclosed its web crawler tech this summer, only saying it was for “training AI models or improving products” without stating outright that it was building a search backend. Senior engineering manager Xueyuan Su is reportedly leading the search engine project.

Tom’s Guide reported: In an effort to stay competitive in AI development, Meta is reportedly creating its own search engine. The move, reported by The Information, is intended to reduce dependence on Google and Microsoft Bing, which currently feed Meta AI with news, sports and stocks. According to a Meta insider, this initiative could serve as a backup in case the partnerships with the tech giants shift.

Led by senior engineering manager Xueyuan Su, over the last year, Meta has been quietly advancing its web-crawling and indexing technologies by gathering web data into searchable indexes. The ultimate aim is for Meta AI to deliver live, conversational answers, enabling the platform to address user questions without reliance on any outside search platform.

In my opinion, it is good that Meta is trying to shed its reliance on Google and Microsoft Bing for research. That said, I am hoping that Meta does not choose to scrape data from its users.