OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, calling for an investigation over the artificial intelligence company’s allegedly restrictive non-disclosure agreements, the Washington Post reported on Saturday, citing a copy of the letter sent to the SEC.

The whistleblowers alleged that OpenAI issued overly restrictive employment, severance, and nondisclosure agreements to its employees, which could have led to penalties against workers who raised concerns about OpenAI to federal authorities, according to the newspaper.

The AI company made employees sign agreements that required them to waive their federal rights to whistleblower compensation, according to the letter seen by the Washington Post.

The agreements also required that employees get prior consent from the company if they wanted to disclose information to federal regulators, the newspaper said, adding that OpenAI did not create exemptions in the employee nondisparagement clauses for disclosing securities violations to the SEC.

An SEC spokesperson said in an emailed statement that it does not comment on the existence or nonexistence of a possible whistleblower submission.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for a comment on the Washington Post report.

OpenAI’s chatbots with generative AI capabilities, such as engaging in human-like conversations and creating images based on text prompts, have stirred safety concerns as AI models become powerful.

OpenAI in May formed a Safety and Security Committee that will be led by board members, including CEO Sam Altman, as it begins training its next artificial intelligence model.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, has said it acted within 24 hours to disrupt “deceptive” use of artificial intelligence (AI) in a covert operation that sought to influence the ongoing Lok Sabha elections.

This influence campaign, called “Zero Zeno”, was run by STOIC, a political campaign management firm in Israel.

The threat actors attempted to leverage OpenAI’s powerful language models for tasks like generating comments, articles, social media profiles that criticised the ruling BJP and praised the Congress, the company led by CEO Sam Altman said.

“In May, the network began generating comments that focused on India, criticised the ruling BJP party and praised the opposition Congress party. We disrupted some activity focused on the Indian elections less than 24 hours after it began,” OpenAI said.

OpenAI said it banned a cluster of accounts operated from Israel that were being used to generate and edit content for an influence operation that spanned X, Facebook, Instagram, websites, and YouTube.

“This operation targeted audiences in Canada, the United States and Israel with content in English and Hebrew. In early May, it began targeting audiences in India with English-language content,” the company said.

Responding to the report, the BJP called it a “dangerous threat” to the democracy.

“It is absolutely clear and obvious that @BJP4India was and is the target of influence operations, misinformation and foreign interference, being done by and/or on behalf of some Indian political parties,” said Minister of State for Electronics and IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar.

“This is very dangerous threat to our democracy. It is clear vested interests in India and outside are clearly driving this and needs to be deeply scrutinized/investigated and exposed. My view at this point is that these platforms could have released this much earlier, and not so late when elections are ending,” he added.

It is absolutely clear and obvious that @BJP4India was and is the target of influence operations, misinformation and foreign interference, being done by and/or on behalf of some Indian political parties.

This is very dangerous threat to our democracy. It is clear vested… https://t.co/e78pbEuHwe

— Rajeev Chandrasekhar (Modiyude Kutumbam) (@Rajeev_GoI) May 31, 2024

OpenAI said it has disrupted five covert operations in the last three months that sought to use our models in support of deceptive activity across the internet. “Our investigations into suspected covert influence operations (IO) are part of a broader strategy to meet our goal of safe AI deployment.”

San Francisco, United States:

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said Thursday it has disrupted five covert influence operations over the past three months that sought to use its artificial intelligence models for deceptive activities.

In a blog post, OpenAI said the disrupted campaigns originated from Russia, China, Iran, and a private company based in Israel.

The threat actors attempted to leverage OpenAI’s powerful language models for tasks like generating comments, articles, social media profiles, and debugging code for bots and websites.

The company led by CEO Sam Altman said these operations “do not appear to have benefited from meaningfully increased audience engagement or reach as a result of our services.”

Companies like OpenAI are under close scrutiny over fears that apps like ChatGPT or image generator Dall-E can generate deceptive content within seconds and in high volumes.

This is especially a concern with major elections about to take place across the globe and countries like Russia, China and Iran known to use covert social media campaigns to stoke tensions ahead of polling day.

One disrupted op, dubbed “Bad Grammar,” was a previously unreported Russian campaign targeting Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltics and the United States.

It used OpenAI models and tools to create short political comments in Russian and English on Telegram.

The well-known Russian “Doppelganger” operation employed OpenAI’s artificial intelligence to generate comments across platforms like X in languages including English, French, German, Italian and Polish.

OpenAI also took down the Chinese “Spamouflage” influence op which abused its models to research social media, generate multi-language text, and debug code for websites like the previously unreported revealscum.com.

An Iranian group, the “International Union of Virtual Media,” was disrupted for using OpenAI to create articles, headlines and content posted on Iranian state-linked websites.

Additionally, OpenAI disrupted a commercial Israeli company called STOIC, which appeared to use its models to generate content across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and affiliated websites.

This campaign was also flagged by Facebook-owner Meta earlier this week.

The operations posted across platforms like Twitter, Telegram, Facebook and Medium, “but none managed to engage a substantial audience,” OpenAI said.

In its report, the company outlined AI leverage trends like generating high text/image volumes with fewer errors, mixing AI and traditional content, and faking engagement via AI replies.

OpenAI said collaboration, intelligence sharing and safeguards built into its models allowed the disruptions. 

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

San Francisco:

An OpenAI team devoted to mitigating the long-term dangers of super-smart computers was leaderless on Friday after two high-profile figures left the company.

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and “superalignment” team co-leader Jan Leike announced their departures from the ChatGPT-maker last week, and US media reported that remaining members of the group have either left or been reassigned to other parts of the San Francisco-based company.

The apparent dismantling of an OpenAI team focused on keeping sophisticated artificial intelligence under control comes as such technology comes under increased scrutiny from regulators and fears mount regarding its dangers.

“OpenAI must become a safety-first AGI (artificial general intelligence) company,” Leike wrote Friday in a post on X, formerly Twitter.

Leike called on all OpenAI employees to “act with the gravitas” warranted by what they are building.

It’s been such a wild journey over the past ~3 years. My team launched the first ever RLHF LLM with InstructGPT, published the first scalable oversight on LLMs, pioneered automated interpretability and weak-to-strong generalization. More exciting stuff is coming out soon.

— Jan Leike (@janleike) May 17, 2024

OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman responded to Leike’s post with one of his own, thanking him for his work at the company and saying he was sad to see Leike leave.

“He’s right we have a lot more to do,” Altman said. “We are committed to doing it.”

Altman promised more on the topic in the coming days.

Sutskever said on X that he was leaving after almost a decade at OpenAI, whose “trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous.”

“I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial,” he added, referring to computer technology that seeks to perform as well as — or better than — human cognition.

Sutskever, OpenAI’s chief scientist, sat on the board that voted to remove fellow chief executive Altman in November last year.

The ousting threw the San Francisco-based startup into a tumult, with the OpenAI board hiring Altman back a few days later after staff and investors rebelled.

OpenAI last week released a higher-performing and even more human-like version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins ChatGPT, making it free to all users.

“It feels like AI from the movies,” Altman said in a blog post.

Altman has previously pointed to the Scarlett Johansson character in the movie “Her,” where she voices an AI-based virtual assistant dating a man, as an inspiration for where he would like AI interactions to go.

The day will come when “digital brains will become as good and even better than our own,” Sutskever said during a talk at a TED AI summit in San Francisco late last year.

“AGI will have a dramatic impact on every area of life.”

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

Seattle:

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman defended his company’s AI technology as safe for widespread use, as concerns mount over potential risks and lack of proper safeguards for ChatGPT-style AI systems.

Altman’s remarks came at a Microsoft event in Seattle, where he spoke to developers just as a new controversy erupted over an OpenAI AI voice that closely resembled that of the actress Scarlett Johansson.

The CEO, who rose to global prominence after OpenAI released ChatGPT in 2022, is also grappling with questions about the safety of the company’s AI following the departure of the team responsible for mitigating long-term AI risks.

“My biggest piece of advice is this is a special time and take advantage of it,” Altman told the audience of developers seeking to build new products using OpenAI’s technology.

“This is not the time to delay what you’re planning to do or wait for the next thing,” he added.

OpenAI is a close partner of Microsoft and provides the foundational technology, primarily the GPT-4 large language model, for building AI tools.

Microsoft has jumped on the AI bandwagon, pushing out new products and urging users to embrace generative AI’s capabilities.

“We kind of take for granted” that GPT-4, while “far from perfect…is generally considered robust enough and safe enough for a wide variety of uses,” Altman said.

Altman insisted that OpenAI had put in “a huge amount of work” to ensure the safety of its models.

“When you take a medicine, you want to know what’s going to be safe, and with our model, you want to know it’s going to be robust to behave the way you want it to,” he added.

However, questions about OpenAI’s commitment to safety resurfaced last week when the company dissolved its “superalignment” group, a team dedicated to mitigating the long-term dangers of AI.

In announcing his departure, team co-leader Jan Leike criticized OpenAI for prioritizing “shiny new products” over safety in a series of posts on X (formerly Twitter).

“Over the past few months, my team has been sailing against the wind,” Leike said.

“These problems are quite hard to get right, and I am concerned we aren’t on a trajectory to get there.”

This controversy was swiftly followed by a public statement from Johansson, who expressed outrage over a voice used by OpenAI’s ChatGPT that sounded similar to her voice in the 2013 film “Her.”

The voice in question, called “Sky,” was featured last week in the release of OpenAI’s more human-like GPT-4o model.

In a short statement on Tuesday, Altman apologized to Johansson but insisted the voice was not based on hers.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

San Francisco, United States:

OpenAI will have access to Reddit data for training its artificial intelligence models and will put its technology to work at the popular discussion platform, the companies said Thursday.

Reddit, which debuted on the New York Stock Exchange earlier this year, has been seeking to capitalize on the value of exchanges in its varied discussion groups as it seeks to improve revenues.

Financial details of the partnership between the San Francisco-based tech firms were not disclosed. Reddit relies on advertising for revenue.

“Reddit has become one of the internet’s largest open archives of authentic, relevant, and always up to date human conversations about anything and everything,” Reddit chief executive Steve Huffman said in a joint release.

“Including it in ChatGPT upholds our belief in a connected internet, helps people find more of what they’re looking for, and helps new audiences find community on Reddit.”

OpenAI will access Reddit data in real-time, enhancing such content in ChatGPT and powering tools at the social media platform, the companies said.

Reddit suffered a major outage in December as the site’s communities protested against new fees being charged to provide access to developers.

The row was fallout in the recent artificial intelligence revolution, with Huffman unwilling to allow companies that build AI chatbots like ChatGPT to have free access to the site to perfect their large-language models.

“Reddit needs to be a self-sustaining business, and to do that, we can no longer subsidize commercial entities that require large-scale data use,” Huffman wrote in a Reddit post at the time.

Reddit is essentially run through thousands of “subreddits” — forums on a dizzying array of topics moderated by their creators. 

The biggest subreddits have tens of millions of subscribers, including r/funny, r/games and r/music.

Some habits on Reddit became social media standards, including AMAs, or Ask Me Anything sessions where users can ask an interviewee anything during a certain window of time. 

OpenAI noted in the release that chief executive Sam Altman is a shareholder in Reddit.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

San Francisco:

OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever said on Tuesday he is leaving the ChatGPT maker.

“After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI,” he said in a post on X.

After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the…

— Ilya Sutskever (@ilyasut) May 14, 2024

Sam Altman, CEO of the Microsoft-backed company said Jakub Pachocki will be the company’s new chief scientist.

Pachocki has previously served as OpenAI’s director of research and led the development of GPT-4 and OpenAI Five.

“OpenAI would not be what it is without him,” Altman said, referring to Sutskever.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

New Delhi:

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, on Tuesday, took potshots at Sam Altman-run OpenAI, saying their latest event to announce new AI models made him “cringe.”

Author Ashley St Clair posted on X that with OpenAI, humans can now let AI perceive reality in real time for them and “we may have just replaced the post-truth era with something much worse.”

Musk, a staunch critic of OpenAI, replied that the company’s “demo made me cringe.”

“Can’t wait for the Grok (xAI) version of this demo,” an X user commented.

In March, the tech billionaire sued OpenAI and its CEO Altman, alleging that they breached their original contractual agreements around AI.

OpenAI also hit back at the lawsuit, saying that in order to further the mission, “Musk wanted us to merge with Tesla or he wanted full control.”

Musk had left OpenAI, thinking the company would fail, according to Altman.

At its live-streaming event on Monday, the ChatGPT developer unveiled GPT-4o — the new flagship model that provides GPT-4-level intelligence but is “much faster and improves on its capabilities across text, voice, and vision.”

ChatGPT also now supports more than 50 languages.

(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

San Francisco:

OpenAI on Monday released a higher performing and even more human-like version of the artificial intelligence technology that underpins its popular generative tool ChatGPT, making it free to all users.

The update to OpenAI’s flagship product landed a day before Google is expected to make its own announcements about Gemini, the search engine giant’s own AI tool that competes with ChatGPT head on.

“We’re very, very excited to bring GPT-4o to all of our free users out there,” Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati said at the highly anticipated launch event in San Francisco.

The new model GPT-4o — the “O” stands for omni — will be rolled out in OpenAI’s products over the next few weeks, the company said, with paid customers having unlimited access to the tool.

The company said the model could generate content or understand commands in voice, text, or images.

“The new voice (and video) mode is the best computer interface I’ve ever used. It feels like AI from the movies,” said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman in a blog post.

Altman has previously pointed to the Scarlett Johansson character in the movie “Her” as an inspiration for where he would like AI interactions to go.

“Talking to a computer has never felt really natural for me; now it does,” he added.

Murati and engineers from OpenAI demonstrated the new powers of GPT-4o at the virtual event, posing challenges to the beefed-up version of the ChatGPT chatbot.

The demo mainly featured OpenAI staff members asking questions to the voiced ChatGPT, which responded with jokes and human-like banter.

The bot served as an interpreter from English to Italian, interpreted facial expressions and walked one user through a difficult algebra problem.

The company said that GPT-4o had the same powers as the previous version when it came to text, reasoning, and coding intelligence, and set new industry standards for multilingual conversations, audio, and vision.

In one demonstration, ChatGPT successfully interpreted an employee’s surroundings through a smartphone camera, speaking in a friendly, feminine voice, not unlike the AI bot in the film “Her”.

“Hmmm from what I can see it looks like you’re in some kind of recording or production set-up with lights, tripods… you might be gearing up to shoot a video or make an announcement?” the ChatGPT bot said.

– ‘Take our time’ –

Anticipation was high in recent weeks that OpenAI would release an AI-amped version of an online search tool to compete with Google search engine, but on Friday Altman said this would not be the case.

Observers were also waiting for the launch of GPT-5, but Altman said last week that his company would “take our time on releases of major new models.”

The event is just the latest episode in the AI arms race that has seen OpenAI-backer Microsoft surpass Apple as the world’s biggest company by market capitalization.

OpenAI and Microsoft are in a heated rivalry with Google to be generative AI’s major player, but Facebook-owner Meta and upstart Anthropic are also making big moves to compete.

All the companies are scrambling to come up with ways to cover generative AI’s exorbitant costs, much of which goes to chip giant Nvidia and its powerful GPU semiconductors.

Making the new model available to all users may raise questions about OpenAI’s path to monetization amid doubts that everyday users are ready to pay a subscription.

Until now, only lower performing versions of OpenAI or Google’s chatbots were available to customers for free.

“We are a business and will find plenty of things to charge for,” Altman said on his blog.

The AI makers are also feeling pressure from publishers and creators, who are demanding payment for any content used to train the models.

OpenAI has signed content partnerships with the Associated Press, the Financial Times and Axel Springer, but is also caught in a major lawsuit with The New York Times.

AI companies have also been confronted with separate lawsuits from artists, musicians, and authors in US courtrooms.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)

ChatGPT maker OpenAI said on Monday it would release a new AI model called GPT-4o, which reasons across voice, text and vision.

OpenAI’s chief technology officer, Mira Murati, said during a livestream event that the new GPT-4o model would be offered for free because it is more efficient than the company’s previous models.

OpenAI researchers showed off ChatGPT’s new voice assistant capabilities. In one demonstration, the ChatGPT voice assistant was able to read out a bedtime story in different voices, emotions and tones.

In a second demonstration, the ChatGPT voice assistant used it vision capabilities to walk through solving a math equation written on a sheet of paper.

Paid users of GPT-4o will have greater capacity limits than the company’s paid users, Murati said.

OpenAI is under pressure to expand the user base of ChatGPT, its popular chatbot product that wowed the world with its ability to produce human-like written content and top-notch software code.

Shortly after launching in late 2022, ChatGPT was called the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users. However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT’s website has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb. 

Giving ChatGPT the search engine-like capability of accessing and linking to up-to-date, accurate Web information is an obvious next step, and one that the current iteration of ChatGPT finds challenging, industry experts have said.

OpenAI made the announcements a day before Alphabet is scheduled to hold its annual Google developers conference, where it is expected to show off its own new AI-related features.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)