Jon Christian

Damage Plan OpenAI has had a tough week. Its reveal of the upcoming ChatGPT 4o — that's an "o" for "omni," not a "40" as in the number — was impressive on a technical level, but CEO Sam Altman made an unforced error by comparing the talking AI to the dark 2013 romance film "Her," […]

Head Count Electric vehicle maker Tesla has been hit by round after round after round of layoffs over the past month or so, to the degree that it's somewhat hazy exactly how many employees have been affected. And the cuts keep piling up, with CNBC now obtaining government paperwork through a public records request that […]

Arms Race New photos from NASA show the space agency's astronauts testing spacesuits in the Arizona desert — but we're not sure these things are quite spaceworthy yet. Why? Because they're missing, among other things, arms, legs and visors, leading to an entertaining photoshoot in which astronauts Kate Rubins and Andre Douglas trudge around completing […]

We might like to think of ourselves as rational creatures, but the fact is that the whole experience of being human is basically the result of a bunch of swirling chemicals in the brain. Case in point? A team of European and Israeli doctors just released an intriguing study, published in the journal Psychother Psychosom, […]

Cone of Silence ChatGPT creator OpenAI might have "open" in the name, but its business practices seem diametrically opposed to the idea of open dialogue. Take this fascinating scoop from Vox, which pulls back the curtain on the restrictive nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that employees at the Sam Altman-helmed company are forced to sign to retain […]

Terminator Prequel It might sound like a joke, but OpenAI has dissolved the team responsible for making sure advanced AI doesn't turn against humankind. Yes, you heard that right. The objective of the team, formed just last summer, was to "steer and control AI systems much smarter than us." "To solve this problem within four […]

The Fame Monster After spending years relentlessly chasing publicity across the media, huge speaking events and a world tour of multiple continents, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is humblebragging that all his newfound fame is taking a toll. "The inability to just be mostly anonymous in public is very, very strange," he said on the Logan […]

Things haven't gone entirely according to plan with Neuralink's first human patient: as the company conceded after questions from the Wall Street Journal, wires inside the patient's brain appear to have come loose, degrading the quality of implant's signal. This wasn't entirely unforeseen. Doctors had previously warned about danger to Neuralink's test patients due to […]

Brush Strokes In a shining example of the Streisand Effect, CNN reports that a powerful mining magnate has been trying to get an unflattering portrait of her removed from a museum — driving more attention to the painting than it ever would have picked up otherwise. The tycoon in question, Gine Rinehart, is the executive […]

Model Behavior OpenAI's public-facing products — like its smash hit text generator ChatGPT and its formidable image generator DALL-E — are notorious prudes: ask them for anything NSFW, and they demure. But it sounds like that might not always be the case. As spotted by Wired, the company's newly-released "model spec" — basically draft documentation […]