All posts tagged: Sam Altman

OpenAI CEO apologizes to Tumbler Ridge community

OpenAI CEO apologizes to Tumbler Ridge community

Published by skeptic

In a letter to the residents of Tumbler Ridge, Canada, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he is “deeply sorry” that his company failed to alert law enforcement about the suspect in a recent mass shooting. After police identified 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar as a suspected shooter who allegedly killed eight people, the Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI had flagged and banned Van Rootselaar’s ChatGPT account in June 2025 for describing scenarios involving gun violence. The company’s staff debated alerting police but ultimately decided against it, eventually reaching out to Canadian authorities after the shooting. OpenAI has since said that it is improving safety protocols, for example by putting more flexible criteria in place to determine when accounts get referred to authorities, and by establishing direct points of contact with Canadian law enforcement. In Altman’s letter, which was first published in the local newspaper Tumbler RidgeLines, the CEO said he’d discussed the shooting with Tumbler Ridge Mayor Darryl Krakowka and British Columbia Premier David Eby, and they’d all agreed “a public apology was necessary,” but …

At ‘AI Coachella,’ Stanford Students Line Up to Learn From Silicon Valley Royalty

At ‘AI Coachella,’ Stanford Students Line Up to Learn From Silicon Valley Royalty

Published by skeptic

As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a very Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford’s buzziest offerings this semester, and like the music festival, it features a star-studded lineup of celebrities—in this case, not pop artists, but Big Tech CEOs. The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former VP of engineering for cloud services. The list of guest lecturers reads like a Signal group chat many VCs would pay to join: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic philosopher Amanda Askell, and White House Senior Policy Advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, among others. It’s the fourth year Midha and Abbott have taught some version of this class. Once registration went live this year, the class’s 500 seats quickly filled up, with dozens of students on the …

Sam Altman’s Orb Company Promoted a Bruno Mars Partnership That Doesn’t Exist

Sam Altman’s Orb Company Promoted a Bruno Mars Partnership That Doesn’t Exist

Published by skeptic

Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning startup, Tools for Humanity, announced last week that a new product called Concert Kit—designed to give verified humans a way to purchase concert tickets—would first roll out on Bruno Mars’ world tour of his latest studio album, The Romantic. However, Bruno Mars Management and Live Nation, the producer for the Romantic Tour, told WIRED in a joint statement on Tuesday that the partnership “does not exist,” and that Tools for Humanity never even approached them about working together. The confusion stemmed from a Tools for Humanity event April 17 in San Francisco, where chief product officer Tiago Sada said the company would be joining the Romantic Tour to not just provide access to tickets but also “VIP experiences for verified humans.” The statement was reiterated in a blog post published by the company, which read: “Concert Kit launches today and will roll out during the Bruno Mars World Tour featuring DJ Pee .Wee (aka Anderson .Paak), where verified humans will have exclusive access to VIP suite experiences at select stops.” A video …

Join Our Livestream: Musk v. Altman and the Future of OpenAI

Join Our Livestream: Musk v. Altman and the Future of OpenAI

Published by skeptic

Two of Big Tech’s most influential billionaires, Sam Altman and Elon Musk, will go head-to-head in a highly anticipated trial beginning April 27. In Musk v. Altman, a judge, advised by a jury, will ultimately determine whether OpenAI has strayed from its founding mission to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits humanity, and the ruling could influence how the world’s leading AI developer controls and distributes its technology. For now, you can learn more about the trial here. On the Panel On May 8, a panel of WIRED experts will go live to answer your questions about this consequential case. Zoë Schiffer: WIRED’s director of business and industry, who oversees coverage of business and Silicon Valley. Maxwell Zeff: a senior writer at WIRED covering the business of artificial intelligence. He writes the weekly Model Behavior newsletter, which focuses on the people, communities, and companies behind Silicon Valley’s AI scene. Paresh Dave: a senior writer at WIRED covering the inner workings of Big Tech companies. He writes about how apps and gadgets are built and …

Sam Altman Returns to the Spotlight as Hollywood and Tech Collide at the Breakthrough Prize Ceremony

Sam Altman Returns to the Spotlight as Hollywood and Tech Collide at the Breakthrough Prize Ceremony

Published by Sam Flores

And then there was Sam Altman, making one of his first public appearances since a man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the gate to his San Francisco home. The OpenAI CEO told VF that things have been “up and down, but calm enough,” after the incident, adding “it was a really difficult thing.” Altman has linked the April 10 attack on his home in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood to a surge of media scrutiny, including a report published on April 6 by The New Yorker, written by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz, which included accusations that Altman is a habitual liar and that his alleged serial lying briefly cost him his job at OpenAIi. “Sam Altman May Control Our Future. Can He Be Trusted?” read the headline.” (Vanity Fair and The New Yorker are both owned by Condé Nast, and Condé Nast has a publishing agreement with OpenAI.) The suspect— whom family members say is suffering from a mental health crisis— remains in custody without bail as he awaits an arraignment set for …

Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.

Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder.

Published by skeptic

At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions.  And it’s starting with Tinder. Tools for Humanity, the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life. “The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?” World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. …

Zoom teams up with World to verify humans in meetings

Zoom teams up with World to verify humans in meetings

Published by skeptic

Meeting platform Zoom has announced a partnership with World, Sam Altman’s human ID verification company, to ensure that the people attending meetings are actually human and not AI-generated imposters. The threat is real and growing fast. The most dramatic example came in early 2024, when engineering firm Arup lost $25 million after an employee in Hong Kong authorized a series of wire transfers during what appeared to be a routine video call with the company’s CFO and several colleagues. Every person on that call — except the victim — turned out to be an AI-generated deepfake. A similar attack hit a multinational firm in Singapore in 2025. Across the board, financial losses from deepfake-enabled fraud exceeded $200 million in just the first quarter of last year, according to one estimate, and the average loss per corporate incident now tops $500,000, according to security industry reports. So while deepfake video-call fraud may not be something most people ever encounter personally, it represents a serious risk for businesses, especially those that regularly conduct high-value transactions over video. …

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Now Proves You’re Human on Tinder

Gazing Into Sam Altman’s Orb Now Proves You’re Human on Tinder

Published by skeptic

Sam Altman’s iris-scanning, humanity-verifying World project announced at an event in San Francisco on Friday that Tinder users around the globe can now put a digital badge on their profiles signaling to potential suitors that they’re a real human, provided they’ve already stared into one of the startup’s glossy white Orbs and allowed their eyes to be scanned. The announcement follows a pilot project for Tinder verification that World previously conducted in Japan. The global Tinder expansion is one of the biggest tests yet for World, and the company’s bet that everyday consumers will be willing to sign up for biometric verification services to use internet applications. Founded in 2019 by Altman and Alex Blania, the World project was designed for a future where the internet is overrun with highly capable AI agents that make it incredibly difficult, if not impossible, to tell who is really human. As companies like OpenAI—where Altman is CEO—and Anthropic push AI agents into the mainstream, the problem World was built to solve feels increasingly urgent. But World has struggled …

The Battle for OpenAI’s Soul

The Battle for OpenAI’s Soul

Published by skeptic

Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman will head to trial this month in an Oakland, California, federal courtroom, where nine jurors will settle a years-long dispute between the cofounders of OpenAI over the group’s founding mission. While spats between Silicon Valley’s most influential billionaires are notable in their own rite, former OpenAI employees and nonprofits have taken a special interest in this case because the ruling could influence how the world’s leading AI developer controls and distributes its technology. The stakes are especially high for OpenAI’s corporate future, as a bad outcome in this case could negatively impact its plans to file for an IPO later this year. The ChatGPT-maker is racing against Anthropic and Musk’s SpaceX (which now owns a rival AI lab, xAI) to go public. Musk’s status as an OpenAI competitor—who could benefit significantly if the case goes his way—has raised serious questions about whether he’s the right person to bring it before a jury. A settlement out of court is still possible, though legal experts and people close to the case …

At the HumanX conference, everyone was talking about Claude

At the HumanX conference, everyone was talking about Claude

Published by skeptic

At the HumanX AI conference in San Francisco this week, thousands of techies descended upon the city’s Moscone Center, where discussion focused on the ways agentic AI is changing the business. Agents, which automate business and coding tasks, have begun to be deployed across industries — largely through enterprise and consumer-focused chatbots. Naturally, I wanted to know which chatbot was the most popular, and I consistently heard one name most often: Claude. Anthropic got shoutouts in many of the panels held throughout the week, but it also was a topic of discussion with the vendors I spoke to while perusing the convention room floor. The chatbot I didn’t hear a lot about? ChatGPT. One of the vendors I spoke to made a point of telling me that he and his team used Claude a lot, while he felt ChatGPT and OpenAI had gone downhill — or, as the internet likes to say, “fell off.” Lately, that does not appear to be a particularly unique take. Indeed, it’s not clear what will cure the perception that, …