"OpenAI is nothing without its people" was posted on X by many workers, including Mira Murati who was at the time the interim CEO. There were also lots of coloured hearts being shared. The whole thing had the vibes of last year's big Silicon Valley meltdown: the shake-up at Twitter (now X) following Elon Musk's takeover. Laid-off Twitter staff sent a coded message then too: the emoji giving a salute.

As Sam Altman looks to steer OpenAI through choppy waters following the turmoil of his ouster and return as chief executive, he will be working with an initial board of directors consisting of two new faces--and one holdover from the previous board that fired him. The two joiners are seasoned tech veteran Bret Taylor, who was formerly co-CEO of Salesforce and chairman of Twitter, and Larry Summers, the onetime Treasury secretary and Harvard University president whose appointment surprised some observers. Remaining on the board is Adam D'Angelo, a former Facebook executive and the founder of the question-and-answer website Quora, a potential sign that Altman may not have everything his own way after his dramatic reinstatement late Tuesday.

Back in the 1990s, anyone suggesting that we'd need to adapt to climate change while also cutting emissions was met with suspicion. Most climate change researchers felt adaptation studies would distract from the vital work of keeping pollution out of the atmosphere to begin with. Despite this hostile environment, a handful of experts were already sowing the seeds for a new field of research called "climate change adaptation": study and policy on how the world could prepare for and adapt to the new disasters and dangers brought forth on a warming planet. Today, their research is more important than ever. Take a moment out of your day to appreciate these truly remarkable rivers.

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.

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