As part of its goal to pivot away from its nonprofit origins and become a for-profit business within two years, OpenAI last week announced a $200 a month "pro tier" that will give subscribers unlimited access to a faster version of its most powerful ChatGPT engine — called o1 — as well as the voice mode that lets you talk to the advanced chatbot (which is capable of humanlike reasoning).
The news about ChatGPT Pro, the first of 12 new product announcements to be delivered each work day starting Dec. 5, was shared via a 15-minute livestream called 12 Days of OpenAI, hosted by CEO Sam Altman. And it came the day after Altman told The New York Times at the newspaper's DealBook summit that ChatGPT has seen explosive growth since it was launched two years ago and is now hosting 300 million weekly active users — that's three times as many as it was hosting as of November 2023.
Video of the 35-minute interview is here and it's worth a watch, given Altman's belief that we'll see a general artificial intelligence (think Jarvis from the Marvel movies) "sooner than most people think" — in a few years — and given his optimism that someone else will figure out how to make sure it doesn't harm humanity. Altman also said he isn't concerned that his OpenAI co-founder Elon Musk, who's now suing the company and has started his own AI company, called xAI, might sway the incoming Trump administration in a way that will harm Musk's competitors (Musk, in a revised lawsuit filed in November, is asking the courts to stop OpenAI's transition to a for-profit company).
"I believe pretty strongly that Elon will do the right thing and that it would be profoundly unAmerican to use political power to the degree that Elon has it to hurt competitors and advantage his own businesses," Altman said. "I'm not that worried about it."
But back to the quest to turn into a for-profit company: Days before all this news hit, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told The Financial Times that the company is considering adding advertisements to its chatbot as it looks for new ways to make money. Though it doesn't have "active plans" right now to serve up ads as you prompt ChatGPT, Friar told the FT that OpenAI planned to be "thoughtful about when and where we implement [ads]." She also pointed to the ad expertise of OpenAI's top executives, including Chief Product Officer Kevin Weil, who built ad-supported products at Instagram and X. "The good news with Kevin Weil at the wheel with product is that he came from Instagram. He knows how this [introducing ads] works," Friar said in the FT interview.
What does this mean for you? I'd say enjoy your ad-free chatbot experience while it lasts — not just with ChatGPT but with other currently free AI services as well. As the FT adds, Google and Meta led the way in capitalizing on their massive user bases — that's you and me — with advertising, and OpenAI needs the money. The success of ChatGPT led revenue to surge to about $4 billion on an annualized basis, the FT notes, but it adds that the high cost of running data- and power-intensive AI systems means OpenAI will spend more than it's taking in and may "burn through more than $5 billion of cash."
Here are the other doings in AI worth your attention.
Google DeepMind's new model is best yet at predicting weather
While death and taxes are among life's certainties, something that remains less definite is what the weather will be on any given day — despite the best forecasts of meteorologists. That's why the news that Google DeepMind's latest AI model may be the "best yet" at predicting the weather, according to the MIT Technology Review, gets a shout-out in this week's nod to AI for the public good.
Called GenCast, DeepMind's new model "was trained on 40 years of weather data (1979 to 2018) and then generated a forecast for 2019," the MIT Review noted. "In its predictions, it was more accurate than the current best forecast, the Ensemble Forecast, ENS, 97% of the time, and it was better at predicting wind conditions and extreme weather like the path of tropical cyclones."
You can learn more about GenCast in an overview published in Nature that explains why knowing whether it'll rain or snow matters. "Every day," the overview says, "people, governments and other organizations around the world rely on accurate weather forecasts to make many key decisions — whether to carry an umbrella, when to flee an approaching tropical cyclone, how to plan the use of renewable energy in a power grid, or how to prepare for a heatwave."
In other Google news, the company published a blog item recapping the seven AI-related news announcements it made in November. And though it was interesting to read how people are using Google Lens to find products and comparison shop for holiday presents, the bit that caught my attention is how the company has expanded its AI-flood forecasting model to cover "100 countries in areas where 700 million people live." Another AI use case for the public good.
Spotify wraps up the year with a weird AI podcast
Popular music-streaming service Spotify closes out each year with a wrap-up of the year's most popular songs, artists and podcasts, based on the content consumed by its more than 250 million subscribers from around the world. It's called "Spotify Wrapped," and we learned that Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso was the top song (on Apple Music, it was Not Like Us by Kendrick Lamar, CNET's Ty Pendlebury notes).
Spotify also sends individual users rundowns of their listening habits for the year. And this year's data-lite Spotify roundups included a new feature that uses Google's NotebookLM AI technology to create a "Wrapped AI Podcast," in which two AI bots discuss your listening habits based on your song preferences — and "flatter" your taste in music, Pendlebury adds.
If that sounds a little weird and cringe-inducing, it's because it is, and I'm not the only one who thinks so. Vox calls it a "bizarre addition" that feels "both like listening to a doctor go through your bloodwork results and a psychic vaguely supposing facts about your life." Forbes called the AI podcast a "bad idea" and said, "Listening to a couple of AI bots mindlessly spitting out empty observations while mimicking the tempo of human speech is a soul-destroying experience."
All that prompted me to ask Google for a list of the most popular songs about screwing up. It sent me to this list of "20 Songs About Messing Up." You're welcome.
If you want to hear your personalized podcast and decide for yourself, go to the top menu of Spotify's mobile app and select Wrapped > AI Podcast. "It's worth noting that it's short — there's no music — and it's simply the two 'hosts' reading your stats," Pendlebury adds. Enjoy?
Also worth knowing...
President-elect Donald Trump picked tech investor, former PayPal executive and friend of Elon Musk David Sacks as his "White House AI and Crypto Czar," putting him in charge of US efforts to promote the technologies. Sacks, who made some of his fortune after selling Yammer to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in 2012, is a former Trump critic, saying the ex-president "had disqualified himself from being a candidate at a national level" after the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, CNBC notes. But with expectations that AI and crypto will be big moneymakers for tech investors, Sacks became a "major Trump booster" earlier this year, CNBC said.
Though chatbots like ChatGPT are "now acing nearly every math test they encounter," AI still isn't smarter at math than humans, at least not yet, Science reports. That's the take after a "tech research institute called Epoch AI rounded up 60 expert mathematicians to raise the bar with the most challenging math test they could muster," Science said. "Leading models correctly answered fewer than 2% of the questions, showing just how far they are from disrupting the field" for mathematicians.
If you're looking for insight into how AI scientists are thinking about AI, the University of Pennsylvania Press is offering a collection of essays from noted experts as a free PDF that's worth the download. Called Realizing the Promise and Minimizing the Perils of AI for Science and the Scientific Community, it includes thoughts from internet pioneer Vint Cerf, who offers this caution: "These systems produce the illusion of human discourse and are often extremely convincing, even when completely wrong. We are learning to use them in myriad ways but should be wary of being misled by the glib responses to our prompts."
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