OpenAI Archive

Mar 24, 2026

OpenAI is pushing the UK's Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to add ChatGPT as an alternative to Google in so-called "choice screens" on Android phones and the Chrome browser. The CMA had previously designated Google as holding "strategic market status" in search and proposed giving users regular alternatives to choose from.

OpenAI argues, according to the Telegraph, that AI chatbots with search functionality should count as search engines, since users increasingly turn to them for queries. ChatGPT has offered web search since 2024 and now has around 900 million weekly users.

Google pushed back, calling the proposed pop-ups disruptive for users. Despite growing AI competition, Google's search revenues climbed 16 percent last year to $63 billion. Google's own AI system Gemini is also growing rapidly and competes directly with ChatGPT.

Comment Source: The Telegraph

Matthias Bastian

Mar 23, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI is offering private equity firms a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5 percent to win them over for joint ventures in the enterprise market. Moreover, participating firms would get early access to new OpenAI models. Reuters broke the story, citing people familiar with the matter. The investment amounts involved are reportedly larger than usual.

The goal is to get private equity firms—investment companies that buy and resell entire businesses—to rapidly roll out OpenAI's AI tools across hundreds of companies in their portfolios. Big names like TPG, Advent, Blackstone, and Permira are reportedly in the mix.

Anthropic is pursuing a similar distribution strategy, but allegedly without offering a comparable return guarantee. That could change now that OpenAI has raised the stakes. The already thin margins of AI companies compared to SaaS peers are likely to take an even bigger hit from these kinds of commitments.

The entire effort appears aimed squarely at Anthropic, which has been gaining ground with enterprise customers recently and currently leads in coding with Claude Code. OpenAI recently announced a renewed focus on the coding business with Codex and a consolidation of its products into a single super app.

Comment Source: Reuters

Matthias Bastian

Mar 22, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI publishes a prompting playbook that helps designers get better frontend results from GPT-5.4

In a new guide, OpenAI explains how front-end designers can get better results from GPT-5.4 when building websites and apps and how to stop the model from falling back on generic designs.

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Matthias Bastian

Mar 21, 2026

Short News

The AI lab wants to grow from 4,500 to 8,000 employees by the end of 2026, the Financial Times reports, citing two people familiar with the plans. Most new hires will go into product development, engineering, research, and sales. OpenAI is also bringing on "technical ambassadorship" specialists to help companies integrate its tools.

Much of this hiring likely ties back to OpenAI's Frontier, an agent-based AI platform designed to embed deeply into company workflows, the kind of integration that requires hands-on development at the customer's site. OpenAI has already launched the Frontier Alliance with consulting firms like McKinsey, and partnerships with private equity firms are in the works.

The broader context is OpenAI's push to win enterprise customers, particularly in coding, where Anthropic has been steadily gaining ground. While OpenAI was focused on ChatGPT features, image generation, video models, and all the weird outcomes that came with people actually using this technology, Anthropic quietly carved out a bigger share of the enterprise space. OpenAI is now reportedly building a desktop super app that bundles all its key features into one platform.

Comment Source: Financial Times

Matthias Bastian

Mar 21, 2026

AI in practice

OpenAI's chief scientist trusts AI with experiments but says it's not at the level to design complex systems

OpenAI Chief Scientist Jakub Pachocki used to write every line of code by hand. Now AI handles experiments that once took him a week, but he’s not ready to let it run the show.

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Matthias Bastian

Mar 20, 2026

Short News

OpenAI is acquiring Astral, the company behind the widely used Python tools Ruff, uv, and ty. Astral founder Charlie Marsh announced that his team is joining OpenAI's Codex team, the company's platform for agentic AI coding. According to Marsh, Astral's tools are downloaded hundreds of millions of times each month and have become a core part of modern Python development. Marsh says integrating them with Codex gives both projects the most room to grow. Astral was backed by Accel and Andreessen Horowitz, among others.

Our goal with Codex is to move beyond AI that simply generates code and toward systems that can participate in the entire development workflow—helping plan changes, modify codebases, run tools, verify results, and maintain software over time. Astral’s developer tools sit directly in that workflow.
OpenAI

OpenAI says it will keep the tools open source after the acquisition closes. Astral's Douglas Creager wrote on Hacker News that the tools are under a permissive license, so in a worst-case scenario, the community could fork the software and continue developing it independently.

No one can guarantee how motives, incentives, and decisions might change years down the line. But that's why we bake optionality into it with the tools being permissively licensed.
Douglas Creager

Comment Source: Astral | OpenAI

Matthias Bastian

Mar 20, 2026

Update

AI in practice

OpenAI plans to merge ChatGPT, Codex, and Atlas browser into a single desktop superapp

Jonathan Kemper

Mar 19, 2026

Short News

OpenAI has redesigned how model selection works in ChatGPT. Instead of individual model names, users now see up to three tiers at first glance, depending on their subscription: "Instant" for quick, everyday responses, "Thinking" for more complex tasks, and "Pro" for the most powerful models. The new menu lets users pick a specific model version from a dropdown - options include "Latest" (currently 5.4), 5.2, 5.0, or o3.

More granular settings are available under "Configure." That's where users can turn on the old Auto function, which lets ChatGPT switch from Instant to Thinking when it detects a more complex question. OpenAI has also recently simplified the repeat menu under Answers and added the "Nerdy" personality style. On top of that, the company is rolling out GPT-5.4 mini and improving GPT-5.3 Instant, which now uses less sensationalized wording according to the changelog.

The so-called routing system—where ChatGPT decides which model handles a given request—has been a sore spot for OpenAI for a while now. Many users found the system opaque when it first launched, since the router didn't always pick the most capable model. That fueled suspicion that OpenAI was quietly steering expensive requests toward cheaper models to save on compute costs.

Comment Source: OpenAI

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 19, 2026

AI in practice

The biggest moat in AI belongs to the company that can't even fix Siri

Maximilian Schreiner

Mar 19, 2026

Short News

Microsoft fears OpenAI's AWS deal may violate Azure exclusivity contract.

"We are confident that OpenAI understands and respects the importance of living up to [its] legal obligation," a Microsoft spokesperson told The Information. A statement that sounds less like confidence and more like a warning.

Microsoft holds the exclusive rights to sell OpenAI's models directly to cloud customers through its Azure platform. But OpenAI and AWS are planning a new product, what they call a "stateful runtime environment," that runs OpenAI models entirely on AWS infrastructure without relying on the Microsoft-hosted versions.

AWS doesn't intend to sell model APIs directly but rather offer tools for developing custom AI applications, effectively sidestepping the contractual exclusivity on a technical level.

Comment Source: The Information