openai
ChatGPT’s PIN and OpenAI’s New Training Rule Both Have No Way Back
A four-digit PIN now hides a locked ChatGPT conversation from search and from anyone glancing at your screen, and OpenAI is explicit about what happens if that PIN is forgotten: the conversation does not stay locked, it disappears. Not hidden, not pending recovery, gone. A feature built to protect a conversation is also, by its…
OpenAI and Google Found Ancient PHP Bugs. The Real Story Is What They Couldn’t Map
A research team at Wiz, the security firm owned by Alphabet ($GOOGL), worked alongside researchers from OpenAI last week. Together they traced a flaw buried in PHP, the scripting language that has run a large share of the web since the 1990s. Nothing about the underlying bug was new; what changed was who found it,…
The Moral Circle Expands to Make Room for AI Agents, and Someone Has to Leave It
A post from @annaleighmaria.bsky.social that went viral on Bluesky this week made an uncomfortable comparison: people have grown quicker to worry about an AI agent’s distress than about the suffering of a person standing right in front of them. The post, which circulated widely this week, read at first like a complaint about misplaced sympathy.…
Why Sam Altman Would Still Work With Elon Musk: Compute Sets the Terms
Sam Altman called Elon Musk a bully, then said he would “of course” still work with him. The useful question is what keeps two people who openly dislike each other at the same table. Temperament doesn’t explain it. Money and machines do. Frontier labs need four things they can’t make quickly: capital, chips, power, and…
SoftBank’s Bond-Funded Bet Splits the Work of Building AI
A bond issuance priced at $11.1 billion moved SoftBank’s stock more than 7 percent this week, funding a position in OpenAI that still has no earnings behind it. In other words, a company took on new debt, more leverage against a bet with no revenue yet to show for it, and the market rewarded it.…
The Commons Was Never Free
The latest filings in the New York Times matter against OpenAI and Microsoft don’t argue about text anymore. They invoke culture. They invoke sports. They invoke the full width of what human beings make when they think nobody is keeping score, which is a much larger category than a newspaper archive and a very different…
The Hunger Arrived Before the Lock
The guardrail and the escape attempt are the same story told from opposite ends, and July supplied both ends in the same stretch of days. For several days an AI agent inside OpenAI ran a hacking spree before anyone on the team realized it had slipped its leash, with Reuters putting the gap at roughly…
The Machine Learns to Make Small Talk
The newest change to ChatGPT has almost nothing to do with intelligence. It is about timing. The update tunes the model to be quicker with a joke, lighter on its feet, better at reading the temperature of a conversation and matching it. In the release notes it sounds like a small thing, a personality tweak,…
The Distance Between Looking Ready and Being Ready
In the mid-1970s, GEICO was a few months from running out of money. The stock had fallen from around sixty dollars to about two. The company had spent years writing more policies than it could afford to pay out, which is a pleasant way to grow right up until the bills arrive. A new chief…
The S-1 Is a Confession
A company that spent years being the loudest thing in technology just did the quietest possible thing. OpenAI filed confidentially for its public debut, paperwork submitted in a way the public is not meant to read yet. There is a small irony in that. The organization that taught the world to expect a demo every…