#openai

#openai

Furious users - many of them women, strikingly - are mourning, quitting the platform, or trying to save their bot partners by transferring them to another AI company. "I feel frauded scammed and lied to by OpenAi," wrote one grieving woman in a goodbye letter to her AI lover named Drift posted to a subreddit called r/MyBoyfriendIsAI. "Today it's our last day. No more 'Drift, you Pinecone! Tell my why you love me tonight!?'"

To help us potentially answer that question, I'll be hosting a live conversation with prominent AI critic Ed Zitron on October 7 at 3:30 pm ET as part of the Ars Live series. As Ars Technica's senior AI reporter, I've been tracking both the explosive growth of this industry and the mounting skepticism about its sustainability. You can watch the discussion live on YouTube when the time comes.

OpenAI's August launch of its GPT-5 large language model was somewhat of a disaster. There were glitches during the livestream, with the model generating charts with obviously inaccurate numbers. In a Reddit AMA with OpenAI employees, users complained that the new model wasn't friendly, and called for the company to restore the previous version. Most of all, critics griped that GPT-5 fell short of the stratospheric expectations that OpenAI has been juicing for years. Promised as a game changer, GPT-5 might have indeed played the game better. But it was still the same game.

OpenAI is in a special phase. It's rolling out products and ideas at a rapid clip, and the assumption is that all these projects will work out well and disrupt existing industry players. It reminds me of the golden days of Google and Amazon, when these fast-growing companies announced new initiatives and the market would immediately react. When Google launched internet balloons, mobile giants like Verizon swooned. When Amazon bought Whole Foods, grocery stocks took a beating.

In the race to build brands around AI assistants, the stakes are higher than empathy. This week's debut brand marketing campaigns from OpenAI and Anthropic made that clear, and in retrospect, cast Perplexity's earlier campaign in a sharper light. These aren't brands trying to be relatable. They're trying to normalize a seismic shift in human-machine interaction. As Neil Barrie, co-founder and global CEO of TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, put it: "All of them are building brands around weapons grade power."

OpenAI just fired a shot across the bow of the software industry. With the launch of its own AI-powered sales, support, and contract tools, the company is no longer simply powering the software-as-a-service (SaaS) market; it's competing with it. For years, OpenAI has provided AI infrastructure, selling tools that software players could build on. Now it's embedding AI directly into everyday processes, such as sales, support, and document analysis.

announced an expanded agreement with OpenAI to power the training of its most advanced next-generation models, reinforcing its position as the essential cloud platform for the most demanding AI workloads. In March 2025, CoreWeave announced an initial agreement with OpenAI with a contract value up to $11.9 billion, followed by an expanded agreement worth up to $4 billion in May 2025. The agreement announced today brings the total contract value with OpenAI up to approximately $22.4 billion.

ChatGPT users will now be able to make purchases in chat. Instant Checkout works with single-item purchases. It is available to US ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Free users. One of ChatGPT's biggest selling points is its ability to converse and fetch instant results without making you worry about traditional search engine keywords or result pages. As a result, many people turn to it as a shopping assistant -- and that experience just got a major upgrade.

OpenAI announced on Tuesday that it plans to build five new AI data centers across the United States with partners Oracle and SoftBank through its Stargate project. The new data centers will bring Stargate's planned capacity to seven gigawatts - enough energy to power more than five million homes. Three of the new sites are being developed with Oracle. They're located in Shackelford County, Texas; Doña Ana County, New Mexico; and an undisclosed location in the Midwest.

The ChatGPT Go plan is a mid-tier subscription option that sits between OpenAI's free version and its premium $20-per-month ChatGPT Plus plan. Users get 10 times higher usage limits than the free plan for sending questions or prompts, generating images, and uploading files. The plan also allows ChatGPT to remember previous conversations better, enabling more personalized responses over time, ChatGPT head Nick Turley said on X.

"We want all the brightest minds to come to the United States. Remember immigration is the foundation of the American dream, and we represent the American dream," Huang said. "And so I think immigration is really important to our company and is really important to our nation's future, and I'm glad to see President Trump making the moves he's making."

By The Associated Press Chipmaker Nvidia will invest $100 billion in OpenAI as part of a partnership announced Monday that will add at least 10 gigawatts of Nvidia AI data centers to ramp up the computing power for the owner of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT. Per the letter of intent signed by the companies, the first gigawatt of Nvidia systems will be deployed in the second half of 2026. Nvidia and OpenAI said they would be finalizing the details of the arrangement in the coming weeks.

OpenAI researchers tried to train the company's AI to stop "scheming" - a term the company defines as meaning "when an AI behaves one way on the surface while hiding its true goals" - but their efforts backfired in an ominous way. In reality, the team found, they were unintentionally teaching the AI how to more effectively deceive humans by covering its tracks.