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OpenAI on Monday launched its new AI model GPT-4.1, along with smaller versions GPT-4.1 mini and GPT-4.1 nano, touting major improvements in coding, instruction following, and long context comprehension. The new models, available only on OpenAI’s application programming interface (API), outperform the company’s most advanced GPT-4o model across the board, the ChatGPT maker said. With improved context understanding, they can support up to 1 million “tokens” — a term that refers to the units of data processed by an AI model. The models are also equipped with refreshed knowledge up to June 2024. GPT-4.1 showed a 21% improvement over GPT-4o and 27% over GPT-4.5 on…

OpenAI appeared to be closer to pulling the trigger on advertising in ChatGPT in recent days, but a growing threat from Google has forced the company to pause those plans as it gears up for a quickly escalating chatbot fight. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sent a memo to staff on December 1 declaring a “code red” and ordering the company’s primary focus to be on improving ChatGPT. As part of that directive, Altman reportedly said the company would be pushing back work on other projects, including the introduction of advertising to its chatbot. The about-face came just days after Tibor Blaho, an engineer working on a Chrome extension that offers pre-written prompts for Chat…

When Apple launched the App Store in 2008, it was impossibly influential to the future of the internet. The all-powerful world wide web was sliced and diced into bite-sized apps oft-dubbed Web 2.0. What followed was not just software that fit in your pocket. From TikTok to Uber, these camera-wielding, GPS-integrated, cloud-connected platforms changed the way we lived. Now, in the wake of AI, the app store is arising anew. But instead of being built as tappable icons inside a mobile OS, they are plugging directly into the conversations of LLMs like Microsoft CoPilot and Anthropic’s Claude. Today, OpenAI—the largest AI platform with 800 million weekly users—is openi…

OpenAI has named labor leader Dolores Huerta and three others to a temporary advisory board that will help guide the artificial intelligence company’s philanthropy as it attempts to shift itself into a for-profit business. Huerta, who turned 95 last week, formed the first farmworkers union with Cesar Chavez in the early 1960s and will now have a say on the direction of philanthropic initiatives that OpenAI says will consider “both the promise and risks of AI.” The group will have just 90 days to make their suggestions. “She recognizes the significance of AI in today’s world and anybody who’s been paying attention for the last 50 years knows she will be a force…

OpenAI and Broadcom have formed a multibillion-dollar partnership to develop OpenAI-designed chips. Under the deal, OpenAI will design the chips to its own specifications and Broadcom will manage the development and fabrication of the chips, as well as help with their deployment. The companies plan to deploy enough chips to require 10 gigawatts of electrical power beginning in mid-2026, and running through 2029. Broadcom stock jumped almost 10% on the announcement Monday. The deal marks the second major move by OpenAI to reduce its dependence on Nvidia, which now dominates the AI chip market—the company announced a partnership with chipmaker AMD last week. …

OpenAI on Thursday released its most capable AI system, GPT-5.5, which the company says will enable a more powerful Codex coding agent. OpenAI is quick to say, however, that GPT-5.5 will power the widening set of general digital work tasks that Codex is capable of. The system is significantly better than previous releases at helping with scientific work, including creative aspects of generating new hypotheses and testing them. The system represents an improvement in autonomous or agentic capability. GPT-5.56 “represents a step toward AI systems that can complete complex, multi-step tasks on a computer without human guidance,” OpenAI says in a blog post. GPT-5.5, …

OpenAI is further proving that 2025 is the year of agentic AI. The artificial intelligence giant revealed another new feature from ChatGPT this week, called Deep Research, which it claims can gather research from across the web and summarize it in easy-to-read reports. “Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently—you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst,” the company wrote in a Sunday blog post. Every output shows clear citations and a summary of the agent’s thinking. The tool is powered by its upcoming Ope…

Well, well, well—look who suddenly wants a word with the sheriff in the fair-use Wild West landscape of artificial intelligence. As Bloomberg reports, Microsoft and its partner company OpenAI are investigating the white-hot Chinese startup DeepSeek after Microsoft security researchers allegedly discovered people linked to DeepSeek withdrawing large amounts of data through the company’s API last fall. Elsewhere, White House AI czar David Sacks told Fox News on Tuesday that there is “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek “distilled” knowledge from OpenAI’s AI models. These allegations align with other suspicious aspects of the new AI. For instance, when a Fast Company…

Semiconductor maker AMD will supply its chips to artificial intelligence company OpenAI as part of an agreement to team up on building AI infrastructure, the companies said Monday. OpenAI will also get the option to buy as much as a 10% stake in AMD, according to a joint statement announcing the deal. It’s the latest deal for the ChatGPT maker as it races to beef up its AI computing resources. Under the terms of the deal, OpenAI will buy the latest version of the company’s high performance graphics chips, the Instinct MI450, which is expected to debut next year. The agreement calls for supplying 6 gigawatts of computing power for OpenAI’s “next generation” AI …

The challenge is formidable: Create an ad campaign that somehow shows a brand’s integral role in a pivotal moment of human history. But also, like, make it fun? When OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit 100 million users two months after its launch in November 2022, a UBS study declared it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Now at upwards of 400 million users, ChatGPT might be the best-known consumer product to invest the least in advertising. Historic product awareness, zero brand awareness. For OpenAI chief marketing officer Kate Rouch, the Super Bowl was the perfect stage to start telling the world what the brand actually means. “Obviously, 130 mi…

On December 11, 2015, OpenAI arrived on the scene with a bang. Announced on the penultimate day of the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, an academic confab held in Montreal’s Palais des Congrès by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and others, the organization had been in the planning for months (an infamous July 2015 meeting at the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel brought on board many of OpenAI’s key early staffers). But when it went public with an announcement and blog post, the community reacted with surprise. “This is just absolutely wonderful news, and I really feel like we are watching history in the making,” wrote Sebastien Bubeck, then a researcher at Microsof…

OpenAI released a new base model on Thursday called GPT-4.5, which the company said is its best and smartest model for chat yet. It’s not a reasoning model like OpenAI’s o1 and o3 models, but it can be used to train other models to be reasoning models. Notably, GPT-4.5 was trained using 10 times the computing power (scores of GPUs in data centers) than its predecessor, GPT-4o. The result is a model whose outputs feel more natural and human, OpenAI said in its press release, and demonstrate a better general understanding of the world. Its writing and programming skills are better, and it hallucinates less. It also displays a higher level of emotional intelligence abou…

Could it be any clearer that Sam Altman intends for OpenAI to be a sprawling consumer tech company, not just an AI lab? His public comments certainly suggest as much. Today, The Verge reported that OpenAI has been working on an internal prototype of a social network that would let people share their AI-generated images. OpenAI began as a fairly rudderless little AI lab back in 2015. “We literally had no idea we were ever going to become a company—like, the plan was to put out research papers,” Altman said in a recent Stratechery interview. “But there was no product, there was no plan for a product, there was no revenue, there was no business model, there were no plans…

OpenAI has emerged as one of the government’s leading providers of artificial intelligence. According to the company, 37 federal agencies now have access to its tech, and about 80,000 government employees are now using it regularly. This makes OpenAI a frontrunner in the race between the top AI companies to get their tech in front of government users. These workers are just a small fraction of these frontier labs’ total customer bases, but they’re symbolically valuable. Wooing the U.S. government is important enough to these companies that they’re offering their technology at a steep discount. And, in another bid to speed up the administration’s use of the tech, seve…

When OpenAI launched its text-to-video app Sora in September, there was immediate blowback. To absolutely no one’s surprise, users on the platform had a field day using popular characters in their AI-generated videos, in all sorts of—admittedly creative!—situations. (See OpenAI founder Sam Altman grilling Nintendo’s Pikachu.) Brands condemned the use of their intellectual property without permission. The Motion Picture Academy called out OpenAI for its blatant copyright violations. Soon after launch, Altman wrote a blog post addressing the issue, stating that Sora would give rightsholders “more granular control” of their IP on the app, adding that in the near future h…

As the trial date nears for a showdown between Elon Musk and OpenAI, the artificial intelligence company has sent a letter to the attorneys general in California and Delaware accusing Musk of “anti-competitive behavior.” The letter, seen by both CNBC and the Sacramento Bee, alleges that Musk has been attempting to undermine OpenAI through a series of “attacks” on the company. OpenAI also accuses Musk of “coordinating his efforts” with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, saying the two billionaires are “turning to conduct and approaches that we do think are really highly questionable and sharply worthy of investigation.” “It appears that Mr. Musk has reached new lows, as…

Three AI companies—OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity—are on the verge of receiving approval to sell their technology, hosted on their own cloud systems, directly to the government, a person familiar with the matter tells Fast Company. That authorization will be on a “low impact” and pilot level, the person said, but constitutes a major step toward independence. That independence could help those companies avoid some of the complications created by ongoing partnerships between AI firms and longtime government tech contractors. As large language models have gone mainstream, AI companies have often relied on tech firms that have already passed arduous government security re…

Welcome to AI Decoded, Fast Company’s weekly newsletter that breaks down the most important news in the world of AI. You can sign up to receive this newsletter every week here. OpenAI’s “deep research” gives a preview of the AI agents of the future OpenAI announced this week its AI research assistant, which it calls “deep research.” Powered by OpenAI’s o3-mini model (which was trained to use trial and error to find answers to complex questions), deep research is one of OpenAI’s first attempts at a real “agent” that’s capable of following instructions and working on its own. OpenAI says deep research is built for people in fields like finance, science, policy, …

For the past 30 years, the web browser has been the primary way humans navigate the internet. It makes sense, then, that as artificial intelligence becomes more humanlike in its capabilities, it would use the same tool. That’s basically the idea behind AI-powered browsers, which are definitely having an “it” moment now that OpenAI has launched Atlas, its own web browser that incorporates ChatGPT as an ever-present helper. Atlas follows Perplexity’s Comet, which arrived in the summer to quickly capture the imagination of what an AI browser could do. In both cases, the user can, at any time, call up an AI assistant (aka agent), able to perform multistep tasks—such as na…

OpenAI has prevailed in its fight against Elon Musk. A jury on Monday found that Musk did not file his lawsuit against the AI giant within the statute of limitations. The judge quickly agreed with the jury, making the ruling final. The win for OpenAI came after less than two hours of jury deliberation. Within 20 minutes, the judge, who could have taken up to a month to issue a final ruling in the case, agreed with the advisory jury and issues the final say. Musk had alleged that OpenAI “stole a charity” when it converted into a for-profit company. With the case now behind it, a major obstacle in OpenAI’s path toward becoming a publicly traded company has been…

OpenAI confirmed on March 6 that it is delaying the rollout of “adult mode” in ChatGPT, a feature that would give verified adults access to less-restricted content. The company first announced plans to begin age-gating users last year but has now pushed back the launch twice. Segregating adult users from minors could help in some of OpenAI’s legal and revenue challenges, but nailing the technology may not be easy. Adult mode had been expected this quarter and still is, just later than originally planned. OpenAI referred Fast Company to a comment it gave to Alex Heath’s Sources newsletter saying it was pausing the feature to focus on improvements to ChatGPT, inclu…