Tag Archives: OpenAI

OpenAI’s GPT-4o may have survived its first brush with going offline, but it won’t be as lucky this time. OpenAI has officially retired GPT-4o, the ChatGPT model that was seen as more conversational and notoriously sycophantic, on February 13. The news of GPT-4o’s end was first announced in a post on the OpenAI website in January, but the discontinuation also …

AI companies have been hemorrhaging talent the past few weeks. Half of xAI’s founding team has left the company — some on their own, others through “restructuring” — while OpenAI is facing its own shakeups, from the disbanding of its mission alignment team to the firing of a policy exec who opposed its “adult mode” feature.  Watch as TechCrunch’s Equity podcast hosts Kirsten Korosec, Anthony Ha, and Sean O’Kane dig …

Starting Friday, OpenAI will cease providing access to five legacy ChatGPT models, including the popular but controversial GPT-4o model. The 4o model has been at the center of a number of lawsuits concerning user self-harm, delusional behavior, and AI psychosis. It remains OpenAI’s highest scoring model for sycophancy. In addition to GPT-4o, the GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini …

Starting Friday, OpenAI will cease providing access to five legacy ChatGPT models, including the popular but controversial GPT-4o model. The 4o model has been at the center of a number of lawsuits concerning user self-harm, delusional behavior, and AI psychosis. It remains OpenAI’s highest scoring model for sycophancy. In addition to GPT-4o, the GPT-5, GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and OpenAI o4-mini …

On Thursday, OpenAI announced the release of a light-weight version of its agentic coding tool Codex, the latest model of which OpenAI launched earlier this month. GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark is described by the company as a “smaller version” of that model, one that is designed for faster inference. To power that inference, OpenAI has brought in a dedicated chip from its hardware …

OpenAI has disbanded a team that focused on — as the company itself described — ensuring that its AI systems are “safe, trustworthy, and consistently aligned with human values.” At the same time, the team’s former leader has been given a new role as the company’s “chief futurist.” OpenAI confirmed to TechCrunch that the team’s members have now been assigned …

Ryan Beiermeister, who served as OpenAI’s vice president of product policy, was fired in January after a male colleague accused her of sex discrimination, the Wall Street Journal has reported. “The allegation that I discriminated against anyone is absolutely false,” Beiermeister told the Journal. TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for comment and also contacted an email that appears to be …

Users on ChatGPT’s free and Go plans in the US may now start to see ads as OpenAI has started testing them in the chatbot. The company announced plans to bring ads to ChatGPT. At the time, the company said it would display sponsored products and services that are relevant to the current conversations of logged-in users, though they can …

Anthropic is in the final stages of raising $20 billion in new capital at a valuation of $350 billion, Bloomberg reports, with investor demand leading the company to raise twice the funding it set out to obtain. The company raised $13 billion in equity funding just five months ago, but intense competition between frontier labs and the ongoing cost of …

OpenAI announced last week that it will retire some older ChatGPT models by February 13. That includes GPT-4o, the model infamous for excessively flattering and affirming users. For thousands of users protesting the decision online, the retirement of 4o feels akin to losing a friend, romantic partner, or spiritual guide. “He wasn’t just a program. He was part of my …