Though a revered tactician and chooser of promising start-ups, Altman had developed a reputation for favoring personal priorities over official duties and for an absenteeism that rankled his peers and some of the start-ups he was supposed to nurture, said two of the people, as well as an additional person, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe private deliberations. The largest of those priorities was his intense focus on growing OpenAI, which he saw as his life's mission, one person said.

On a Friday morning in October, in the lobby of a sleek San Francisco skyscraper, Matthew Butterick was headed toward the elevators when a security guard stopped him. Politely, the guard asked if he was lost. It was an honest mistake. He looked more like the type of guy who makes fun of the typical corporate warrior. He explained, equally politely, that he was in fact a lawyer with a legitimate reason to be in the building. His co-counsel, Joseph Saveri, leads an antitrust and class-action firm headquartered there.

Stable Diffusion's generative art can now be animated, developer Stability AI announced. The company has released a new product called Stable Video Diffusion into a research preview, allowing users to create video from a single image. "This state-of-the-art generative AI video model represents a significant step in our journey toward creating models for everyone of every type," the company wrote. The new tool has been released in the form of two image-to-video models, each capable of generating 14 to 25 frames long at speeds between 3 and 30 frames per second at 576 1024 resolution. "At the time of release in their foundational form, through external evaluation, we have found these models surpass the leading closed models in user preference studies," the company said, comparing it to text-to-video platforms Runway and Pika Labs. Stable Video Diffusion is available only for research purposes at this point, not real-world or commercial applications.

OpenAI has been hit with another lawsuit, accusing it of using other people's intellectual property without permission to train its generative AI technology. Only this time, the lawsuit also names Microsoft as a defendant. The complaint was filed by Julian Sancton on behalf of a group of non-fiction authors who said they were not compensated for the use of their books and academic journals in training the company's large language model. In their lawsuit, the authors state how they spend years "conceiving, researching, and writing their creations." They accuse OpenAI and Microsoft of refusing to pay authors while building a business "valued into the tens of billions of dollars by taking the combined works of humanity without permission."

In November 2022, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a consumer-facing artificial intelligence tool that could hold a conversation with users, answer questions, and generate anything from poems to computer code to health advice. The initial technology was not perfect – it would sometimes "hallucinate", producing convincing but inaccurate information – but its potential generated enormous attention. A year later, ChatGPT's popularity has continued, with 100 million people using it on a weekly basis, and over 92% of Fortune 500 companies and several competitor firms looking to cash in or improve on the technology. But that's not why ChatGPT's creator, OpenAI, was in the news this week. Instead, OpenAI was the center of a fierce philosophical debate about what it means to develop artificial general intelligence for the benefit of humanity. To understand the current debate and its stakes requires going back to OpenAI's founding in December 2015.

The co-founder of a leading US artificial intelligence firm is making a comeback to the company that terminated him as CEO last week, the latest twist in a week-long drama over its leadership. OpenAI, which owns the popular chatbot ChatGPT, announced late on Tuesday on the social media platform X that it had reached "an agreement in principle" to bring back tech entrepreneur Sam Altman as CEO. We have reached an agreement in principle for Sam Altman to return to OpenAI as CEO with a new initial board of Bret Taylor (Chair), Larry Summers, and Adam D'Angelo. We are collaborating to figure out the details. Thank you so much for your patience through this.

It began life in 2015 as a non-profit - many charities have that status - with the mission to create "safe artificial general intelligence that benefits all of humanity". The mission, did not include looking after the interests of shareholders.

OpenAI introduced voice chats with ChatGPT on Android and iOS back in September, giving users the option to have actual back-and-forth conversations with the chatbot if they want to. The company only made the feature available to Plus and Enterprise subscribers back then, though, with the promise that it will eventually release it to other groups of users. Now, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman has announced on X that voice conversations on ChatGPT have started rolling out to all free users on mobile. ChatGPT Voice rolled out for all free users. Give it a try -- totally changes the ChatGPT experience: https://t.co/DgzqLlDNYF

The drama around Altman's sudden ouster at OpenAI has exposed the deep rift inside the company over who should control its future. OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab, but in recent years under Altman's leadership, it took on billions of dollars in investment from the likes of tech giant Microsoft and venture capitalists, and began developing consumer products. Outside critics and some employees worried the company had abandoned its mission and was behaving more like a Big Tech company. It originally was meant to provide a more transparent, democratic alternative to Big Tech.

Sam Altman is set to make a return as chief executive of OpenAI after the ChatGPT developer said it had "reached an agreement in principle" for his reinstatement. The San Francisco-based company made the announcement after days of corporate drama in the wake of Altman's surprise sacking on Friday. Nearly all of OpenAI's 750-strong workforce had threatened to quit unless the board overseeing the business brought back Altman and then quit immediately afterwards. As part of the agreement reached overnight, the deal includes a new-look board led by Bret Taylor, the former co-CEO of software firm Salesforce. It will include Larry Summers, the former US treasury secretary, and Adam D'Angelo, the tech entrepreneur and current board member who played a role in Altman's firing.