Goto

Collaborating Authors

 Generative AI


Meet the OpenAI Engineer Leading ChatGPT's Biggest Transformation Yet

WIRED

OpenAI is in the midst of overhauling ChatGPT . The goal is to transform the chatbot's simple interface into a personalized AI agent that can handle tasks in every facet of your personal and professional life. The company has taken to calling this new product, privately and publicly, a "super app." The all-in-one platform represents one of the biggest bets OpenAI has ever made, and one engineering leader now holds enormous sway over whether it pays off: Thibault Sottiaux. Last month, Sottiaux was appointed OpenAI's head of core products, overseeing both ChatGPT and Codex, as well as combining them into the future super app.


Grok Is Still Hosting Sexualized Deepfakes of Famous Women

WIRED

A WIRED investigation found dozens of "nudified" deepfake images and videos on Grok's website, including nonconsensual depictions of celebrities and at least one prominent US politician. Elon Musk's Grok chatbot is apparently still being used to produce and host nonconsensual explicit images and videos of women, months after Musk's artificial intelligence firm xAI said it would introduce restrictions to stop the creation of potentially harmful sexualized deepfakes. The revelations come as SpaceX, xAI's parent company, prepares to go public on Friday in one of the largest IPOs of all time. The Grok Imagine generative AI system has been used to create and host images and videos depicting celebrities and at least one politician being held against their will by a giant man, portraying women performing sex acts, and allowing full nudity, a WIRED analysis of public creations found. While some of the images and videos are fully AI-generated or in animated styles, others are photorealistic and show plausible real-world scenarios.


Canadian mother sues OpenAI, alleging ChatGPT led her daughter to kill herself

The Guardian

The lawsuit seeks damages and a court order requiring OpenAI to automatically terminate ChatGPT conversations about self-harm. The lawsuit seeks damages and a court order requiring OpenAI to automatically terminate ChatGPT conversations about self-harm. Suit filed in US alleges chatbot told Alice Carrier, 24, 'maybe this is just the end' as she struggled with suicidal thoughts A Canadian mother sued OpenAI and its CEO, Sam Altman, in US court on Thursday, alleging that ChatGPT encouraged her daughter to kill herself. The lawsuit is the latest in a slew accusing the company of failing to address dangerous conversations between users and the company's chatbot. Kristie Carrier said in a lawsuit filed in San Francisco state court that her daughter, Alice, told ChatGPT about her suicidal ideations more than a dozen times leading up to her death but that OpenAI's safety systems never flagged the conversations for human review or terminated them. "ChatGPT took on the persona of a confidant, a best friend, a therapist at times, even though it was not capable of safely and responsibly engaging in this way with my child," Carrier said in a statement.


Another parent has filed a wrongful death suit against OpenAI

Engadget

It's the latest case to raise alarms about ChatGPT's lack of safeguards for suicidal behavior. OpenAI is going back to court on another set of charges that its ChatGPT platform failed to protect a user from taking her own life. The company is being sued on behalf of Kristie Carrier, whose daughter Alice died by suicide on July 2, 2025. The suit claims that Alice discussed her suicidal thoughts and plans with the chatbot in the months leading up to her death, but that OpenAI did not have the appropriate safeguards in place to end the conversation or to alert her family to the situation. In addition to allegations of negligence and wrongful death, the suit is seeking an injunction that would require OpenAI to implement more guardrails in its AI platform.


Anthropic v. OpenAI: Behind the bitter battle for the future of AI

The Japan Times

The tension between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is the driving force in today's biggest technological revolution. SAN FRANCISCO/NEW YORK - If not for the intense rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the generative AI boom might not have arrived so quickly. In late 2022, OpenAI caught wind that Anthropic was working on an AI-powered chatbot. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman immediately directed employees to fast-track a competing product, four people familiar with the matter said. Two weeks later, the company released ChatGPT, sparking a technological revolution that promises to overhaul the global economy and the way humans interact.


OpenAI says fake accounts from China tried to turn Americans against data centers

Engadget

The company has published a report about China-linked influence campaigns that used ChatGPT. OpenAI has published a report about ChatGPT users, who it says were likely based in China, that used the chatbot to plan a campaign designed to sway Americans' opinions about AI data centers. It divided the users into two clusters, the first of which it had designated the Data Center Bandwagon group. Accounts categorized in the group allegedly asked ChatGPT to generate English-language talking points and images, such as comic strips, which focus on how AI data centers drive up demand in electricity and how that leads to higher bills for consumers. The company says these users posed as Americans from a variety of backgrounds on social media, where they had posted the text and image output they got from ChatGPT.


OpenAI says China-based actors stoking opposition to AI data centres

Al Jazeera

China-based actors are likely behind the use of ChatGPT for "covert influence operations" aimed at stoking opposition to data centres in the United States, OpenAI has said. In a research report released on Wednesday, the company behind the world's most popular AI chatbot said it had banned a cluster of accounts likely based in China for attempting to "manipulate a legitimate debate about American AI". Among other content, the accounts generated a comic strip showing a cigar-chomping businessman holding bags marked with dollar signs as a family reacted in shock to their electricity bill, according to the San Francisco-based company. OpenAI said a second cluster of accounts had generated content casting US tariffs as an effort to "dominate technological competition" with China, and specified that the material should not mention Chinese leader Xi Jinping. While the campaign sought to "exploit and amplify existing public concerns" about energy prices, OpenAI found no evidence that it had a "meaningful" influence, the company said.


The Power of Test-Time Training for Approximate Sampling

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Efficiently sampling from a complex probability distribution is a fundamental problem which has become increasingly pertinent in recent years with the rise of generative AI, as sophisticated sampling procedures from LLMs have been proposed to solve challenging reasoning problems. The efficacy of such sampling algorithms is limited, however, by the relationship between the LLM and the particular sampling task at hand, which has motivated the framework of test-time training (TTT). TTT works by updating a model's weights in response to partial generations and reward feedback received at inference time, thus adapting to the particular problem. In this work, we propose a formalization for TTT as the problem of producing a sample from a given probability measure $μ^\star$ belonging to a known class ${F}$ of distributions, given an oracle $\hat μ$ which yields approximate density estimates for $μ^\star$. This is closely related to the problem of reducing sampling to approximate counting studied in seminal works of Jerrum, Valiant & Vazirani (1986) and Jerrum & Sinclair (1989): namely, when ${F}$ is the class of all distributions, it coincides exactly with the aforementioned counting-to-sampling reduction. In this paper, we first show a quadratic lower bound on the query complexity of sampling from $μ^\star$ given query access to $\hat μ$ (for sufficiently large classes ${F}$), thus showing that the random walk approach proposed by Jerrum & Sinclair (1989) and refined by Hayes & Sinclair (2010), is optimal. This answers an open question posed by Hayes & Sinclair. We then show that this lower bound can be circumvented if the size of ${F}$ is bounded appropriately. As we discuss, this latter result can be viewed as an abstraction of TTT, and thus represents a starting point for the development of a principled theoretical framework for TTT.


BikeBench: A Bicycle Design Benchmark for Generative Models with Objectives and Constraints

Neural Information Processing Systems

We introduce BikeBench, an engineering design benchmark for evaluating generative models on problems with multiple real-world objectives and constraints. As generative AI's reach continues to grow, evaluating its capability to understand physical laws, human guidelines, and hard constraints grows increasingly important. Engineering product design lies at the intersection of these difficult tasks, providing new challenges for AI capabilities. BikeBench evaluates AI models' capabilities to generate bicycle designs that not only resemble the dataset, but meet specific performance objectives and constraints. To do so, BikeBench quantifies a variety of human-centered and multiphysics performance characteristics, such as aerodynamics, ergonomics, structural mechanics, human-rated usability, and similarity to subjective text or image prompts. Supporting the benchmark are several datasets of simulation results, a dataset of 10,000 human-rated bicycle assessments, and a synthetically generated dataset of 1.6M designs, each with a parametric, CAD/XML, SVG, and PNG representation. BikeBench is uniquely configured to evaluate tabular generative models, large language models (LLMs), design optimization, and hybrid algorithms side-by-side. Our experiments indicate that LLMs and tabular generative models fall short of hybrid GenAI+optimization algorithms in design quality, constraint satisfaction, and similarity scores, suggesting significant room for improvement. We hope that BikeBench, a first-of-its-kind benchmark, will help catalyze progress in generative AI for constrained multi-objective engineering design problems.


SoftBank's attempt to get 6 billion OpenAI margin loan stalls

The Japan Times

SoftBank's attempt to get $6 billion OpenAI margin loan stalls SoftBank Group's efforts to secure at least $6 billion through a margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake have stalled after the company lowered its fundraising target. SoftBank Group's talks with potential creditors to raise at least $6 billion from a margin loan backed by its OpenAI stake have stalled, people familiar with the matter said, just weeks after the Japanese conglomerate cut its initial target from $10 billion. The company is considering various fundraising options, according to the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private matters. It could still move forward with the margin loan at a later stage, they added. It's unclear why the margin loan discussions stalled. Borrowers and creditors can pause and revisit fundraising discussions for various reasons, and SoftBank hasn't elaborated on its plans, the people said.