OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has put a spotlight on private conversations leading up to a rival company suing OpenAI over its upcoming device, io. The Verge reported. 

On Tuesday, Altman posted screenshots of emails on X showing messages between him and Jason Rugolo, the founder of the IYO hearing device startup that’s suing OpenAI. The emails show a mostly friendly exchange where Rugolo asks Altman for his support as Altman discloses a competing device.

“I’d love the opportunity to pitch you to invest $10MM in my AI-meets-audio hardware company, IYO,” Rugolo wrote in a March 4th message. We’re launching the best possible hardware interface to interact with AI-agents, after having obsessively focused on this problem since 2018.”

Altman declined the offer because he was “working on something competitive.” Then, Rugolo followed up by asking whether OpenAI would like to work with him, to which Altman replied he’d have to ask former Apple designer Jony Ive, who he said was “driving” the launch. OpenAI purchased Ive’s AI hardware company for almost $6.5 billion last month.

On June 22nd, OpenAI suddenly scrubbed the “IO” branding from its website, later revealing that it was forced to make the change due to a temporary restraining order granted as part of Iyo’s trademark lawsuit, which was filed on June 9th. OpenAI’s hardware team testified that the io’s hardware isn’t “an in-ear device, nor a wearable.”

CNBC reported: OpenAi CEO Sam Altman on Tuesday criticized a lawsuit filed by hardware startup Iyo, which accused his company of trademark infringement.

Altman said, in response to the suit, that Iyo CEO Jason Rugolo had been “quite persistent in his efforts” to get OpenAI to buy or invest in his company. In a post on X, Altman wrote that Rugolo is now suing OpenAI over the name in a case he described as “silly, disappointing and wrong.”

The suit, earlier this month, stemmed from an announcement in May, when OpenAI said it was bringing on Apple designer Jony Ive by acquiring his artificial intelligence startup io in a deal valued at about $6.4 billion. Iyo alleged that OpenAI, Altman and Ive had engaged in unfair competition and trademark infringement and claimed that it’s on the verge of losing its identity because of the deal.

Economic Times reported: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has criticized a lawsuit filed by hardware startup IYO, which accused his company of trademark infringement.

In a post on X, Altman said IYO’s CEO, Jason Rugolo, had previous made repeated efforts to get OpenAI to either invest in or acquire his company. “Now, he is suing OpenAI over the name. This is silly, disappointing and wrong.”Altman wrote.

Altman then went on to share screenshots of emails from Rugolo asking for investment and proposing a deal involving IYO’s intellectual property (IP).

A mere two days after announcing GPT-4.1, OpenAI is releasing not one but two new models.The company today announced the public availability of o3 and o4-mini. Of the former, OpenAI says o3 is its most advanced reasoning model yet, with it showing “strong performance” in coding, math and science tasks, Engadget reported.

As for o4-mini, OpenAI is billing it as a lower cost alternative that still delivers “impressive results” across those same fields.

More notably, both models offer novel capabilities not found in OpenAI’s past systems. For the first time, the company’s reasoning models can use and combine all of the tools available in ChatGPT, including web browsing, and image generation. The company says this capability allows o3 and o4-mini to solve challenging, multi-step problems more effectively, and “taking real steps toward acting independently.

TechCrunch reported: An organization OpenAI frequently partners with to probe the capabilities of its AI models and evaluate them for safety, Metr, suggests that it wasn’t given much time to test one the company’s highly capable new releases, o3.

In a blog post published Wednesday, Metr writes that one red teaming benchmark of o3 was “conducted in a relatively short time” compared to the organization’s testing of a previous OpenAI flagship model o1. This is significant, they say, because more testing time can lead to more comprehensive results.

“This evaluation was conducted in a relatively short time, and we only tested o3 with simple agent scaffolds,” wrote Metr in his blog post. “We expect higher performance on benchmarks is possible with more elicitation effort.”

Recent reports suggest that OpenAI, spurred by competitive pressure, is rushing independent evaluations. According to the Financial Times, OpenAI gave some testers less than a week for safety checks for an upcoming major launch.

The Verge reported: OpenAI is releasing two new AI reasoning models today: o3, which the company calls its “most powerful reasoning model,” and o4-mini, which is a smaller and faster model that “achieves remarkable performance for its size and cost”, according to a blog post.

The company also says that o3 and o4-mini will be able to “think” with images, meaning that they will “integrate images directly into their chain of thought.”  That could be useful if you show the models things like sketches or whiteboards. OpenAI says that the models will also be able to adjust images by zooming in on them or rotating the image “as part of their reasoning process.”

In addition, OpenAI is announcing that its reasoning models will be able to use all ChatGPT tools, including things like web browsing and image generation. The tools will be available today for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users in o3, o4-mini-high, and will come to o3-pro in “a few weeks.”

OpenAI is reportedly developing its own social media platform.  The Verge, which has broken the news, describes the project as “X-like” in nature, Gizmodo reported.

Little is known about the new site beyond the fact that it exists. The Verge writes that the company is working on an “internal prototype” that involves a “feed” feature and that may be built around the company’s image-generator capabilities. There doesn’t seem to be a name for the platform and it’s also unclear whether it would be separate from ChatGPTor would be integrated into the company’s existing automation service.

Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, has been quietly inviting feedback on the project, sources who spoke with the outlet communicated. Gizmodo reached out to OpenAi for more information.

The move has largely been interpreted as a way to stay competitive with Meta and xAI, Elon Musk’s AI business (which is integrated with Musk’s social media platform, X). Given the description of the new platform prototype as being “X-like,” it stands to reason that this news was designed ruin Musk’s day.

TechCrunch reported: OpenAI is building its own X-like social media network, according to a new report from The Verge. The project is still in the early stages, but there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that contains a social feed.

The report states that it’s unknown if OpenAI plans to launch the social network as a standalone app or if it plans to integrate it within the ChatGPT app.

With this new social network, OpenAI would be taking on Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s social platforms, Facebook and Instagram. The new app would also allow OpenAI to access real-time data to train its AI models, something that both X and Meta already have.

Engadget reported: It looks like OpenAI is building its own X-like social media network, according to a report by The Verge. We don’t have many specifics, but we do know there’s an internal prototype that adds a social feed to ChatGPT’s image generating tool.

It remains unclear if OpenAI will launch this social network as a standalone app or if it will be integrated within the ChatGPT app, which is what the prototype indicates. The report does suggest that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been asking for feedback about the social network from people outside of the company.

One potential reason for this step is that the app would allow OpenAI to gather real-time data from users to train its AI models. It’s also a potentially diversifying move for the company.

Although its uncertain if this project will ever see the light of day, one things probable — it’ll likely get under the skin of Elon Musk, who owns X. Altman and OpenAI have been at odds with Musk for some time.

The company rejected his offer to buy OpenAI, instead offering to “buy Twitter” for just $9.7 billion dollars. It’s worth noting that the offer is four times lower than what Musk paid for the platform and that Altman purposefully used the word Twitter and not X.

It’s only been a day since ChatGPT’s new AI image maker went live, and social media feeds are already flooded with AI-generated memes in the style of Studio Ghibli, the cult-favorite Japanese animation studio behind blockbuster films such as “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Spirited Away”, TechCrunch reported.

In the last 24 hours, we’ve seen AI-generated images representing Studio Ghibli versions of Elon Musk, “The Lord of the Rings”, and President Donald Trump. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman even seems to have made his new profile a Studio Ghibli-style image, presumably made with GPT-4.o’s native image generator. Users seem to be uploading existing images and pictures into ChatGPT and asking the chatbot to re-create it in new styles.

OpenAI’s latest update comes on the heels of Google’s release of a similar AI image feature in its Gemini Flash model, which also sparked a viral movement earlier in March when people used it to remove watermarks from images.

ArsTechnica reported: The arrival of OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 in the spring of 2022 marked a turning point in AI, when text-to-image generation suddenly became accessible to a select group of users, creating a community of digital explorers who experienced wonder and controversy as the technology automated that act of visual creation.

But like many early AI systems, DALL-E 2 struggled with consistent text rendering, often producing garbled words and phrases within images. It also had limitations in following complex prompts with multiple elements, sometimes missing key details or misinterpreting instructions. These shortcomings left room for improvement that OpenAI would address in subsequent iterations, such as DALL-E 3 in 2023.

On Tuesday, OpenAI announced new multimodal image-generation capabilities that are directly integrated into its GPT-4o AI language model, making it the default image generator within the ChatGPT interface. The integration, called “4o Image Generation”, allows the model to follow prompts more accurately (with better text rendering than DALL-E 3) and respond to chat context for image modification instructions.

The new image-generation feature began rolling out Tuesday to ChatGPT Free, Plus, Pro, and Team users, with Enterprise and Education access coming later. The capability is also available within OpenAI’s Sora video-generation tool. OpenAI told Ars that the image generation when GPT-4.5 is selected calls upon the same 4o-based image-generation model as when GPT4.o is selected in the ChatGPT interface.

The Verge reported: OpenAI is pushing back the rollout of ChatGPT’s built-in image generator for free users. In a post on Wednesday, CEO Sam Altman admitted that the image-generation tool is more popular than he expected, adding that “rollout to our free tier is unfortunately going to be delayed for a while.”

OpenAI only just added image generation capabilities to ChatGPT on Tuesday, allowing users to create images directly within the app using the company’s reasoning model, GPT-4o. Since its launch, users have flooded social media feeds with photos transformed into images generated in the style of Studio Ghibli, a trend that even Altman has gotten in on.

OpenAI is launching GPT-4.5 today, its newest and largest AI language model. GPT-4.5 will be available as a research preview for ChatGPT Pro users to start. OpenAI is calling the release its “most knowledgable model yet.” but its not a frontier model and might not perform as well as o1 or o3-mini, The Verge reported.

GPT-4.5 will have better writing capabilities, improved world knowledge, and what OpenAI calls a “refined personality over previous models.” OpenAI says interacting with GPT 4.5 will feel more “natural,” adding that the model is better at recognizing patterns and drawing connections, making it ideal for writing, programming, and “solving practical problems.”

However, OpenAI notes that it won’t introduce enough new capabilities to be considered a frontier model. “GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM, improving on GPT-4’s computational efficiency by more than 10x,” OpenAI says in a document that leaked ahead of its announcement. 

“It does not introduce 7 net-new frontier capabilities compared to previous reasoning releases and its performance is below that of o1, o3-mini, and deep research on most preparedness evaluations.”

CNBC reported: OpenAI on Thursday announced the research preview of GPT-4.5, a general-purpose large language model. It will initially be open to software developers and people with ChatGPT Pro subscriptions.

The model presents inaccurate information less frequently than predecessors, OpenAI said in a blog post.

“Early testing shows that interacting with GPT-4.5 feels more natural. Its broader knowledge base, improved ability to follow user intent, and greater ‘EQ’ make it useful for tasks like improving writing, programming and solving practical problems,” OpenAI wrote. GPT-4.5 demonstrated a lower hallucination rate than OpenAI’s GPT-4o and o1 models in one test, the company said in a report accompanying Thursday’s release.

The release nevertheless represents progress for one of the most highly prized startups in the world. Last month CNBC reported that OpenAI was in discussions on a $40 billion funding round at $350 billion valuation.

VentureBeat reported: It’s here: OpenAI has announced the release of GBT-4.5, a research preview of its latest and most powerful language model (LLM) for chat applications — yet pointedly, the company says specifically in the model’s system card (a report outlining its capabilities, which leaked early online.)

“GPT-4.5 is not a frontier model, but it is OpenAI’s largest LLM, improving in GPT-4’s computational efficiency by more than 10x”

It’s also not a “reasoning model,” the new class of models offered by OpenAI, DeepSeek, Anthropic, and many others that produce “chains-of-thought,” or stream-of-consciousness like text block in which they reflect on their own assumptions and conclusions to try and catch errors before serving up responses /outputs to users. It’s still more of a classical LLM.

A consortium of investors led by Elon Musk is offering $97.4 billion to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, upping the stakes in his battle with Sam Altman over the company behind ChatGPT, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Musk’s attorney, Marc Toberoff, said he submitted a bid for all the nonprofit’s assets to OpenAI’s board of directors Monday.

The unsolicited offer adds a major complication to Altman’s carefully laid plans for OpenAI’s future, including converting it to a for-profit company and spending up to $500 billion on AI infrastructure through a joint venture called Stargate. He and Musk are already fighting in court over the direction of OpenAI.

“It was time for OpenAI to return to the open-source, safety-focused force for good it once was,” Musk said in a statement provided by by Toberoff “We will make sure that happens.”

Altman responded to Musk on X writing, “no thank you but we will buy twitter for $9.74 billion if you want,” using the previous name for the Musk-owned social-media platform and moving the decimal point in the billionaire’s bid for OpenAI one space to the left.

The New York Times reported: A group of investors led by Elon Musk has made a $97.4 billion bid to buy the nonprofit that controls OpenAI, according to two people familiar with the bid, elating a yearlong tussle for control of the company between Mr. Musk and OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.

The consortium includes Vy Capital and Tai, Mr. Musk’s artificial intelligence company, as well as the Hollywood power-broker Ari Emanuel and other investors, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are ongoing.

OpenAI declined to comment on the bid. The company has not yet seen the bid, according to a person familiar with OpenAI’s potential response.

Mr. Musk was one of OpenAI’s co-founders and one of its initial investors but left after a power struggle. Mr. Musk also created his own A.I company to compete head on with Mr. Altman’s company.

The unsolicited offer landed as OpenAI was set to complete a $40 billion fund raising deal that would nearly double the high-profile company’s valuation from just four months ago.

TechCrunch reported: A team of investors led by Elon Musk submitted a $97.6 billion bid to purchase OpenAI on Monday. The news comes by way of Musk’s lawyer, Marc Toberoff, who confirmed the reporting with The Wall Street Journal.

The unsolicited bid is the latest escalation by Musk in his war with co-founder Sam Altman, with whom he cofounded OpenAI with numerous other individuals back in 2015. 

Musk is already embroiled in a legal dispute with OpenAI, filing a 2024 injunction against its effort to transition away from nonprofit status. The Musk-led team is positioning the move as a bid to retain the organizations initial open source focus.

In my opinion, The fight between Elon Musk and Sam Altman over OpenAI might become a big problem for the both of them.