The Archive

OpenAI accuses Musk of trying to "coerce" a settlement days before trial started.

After \~3 weeks of experimentation in OpenAI's Parameter Golf competition, I wrote up why SSMs are structurally disadvantaged relative to transformers in a time- and size-constrained regime (10 min training, 16MB artifact, 25M parameters) on 8xH100s: [https://mradassaad.github.io/posts/why-ssms-struggle-in-parameter-golf/](https://mradassaad.github.io/posts/why-ssms-struggle-in-parameter-golf/) Main findings: 1. SSM in\_proj weights compress up to 3.26x worse than attention QKV under LZMA, directly taxing the compressed parameter budget 2. Architectural wins validated at SP4096 flipped sign...

OpenAI rebuilt WebRTC stack for real-time voice AI with low-latency conversational turn-taking at global scale.

Reddit thread: former startup CTO seeks ideas for spending $10k in expiring OpenAI API credits before year-end.

Musk testifies in OpenAI lawsuit, alleges company abandoned non-profit mission; courtroom sketch circulates on social media.

Anthropic's valuation surpasses OpenAI ($1T vs ~$900B) on secondary markets; enterprise momentum outpaces OpenAI's consumer-led narrative.

Reddit user observes that OpenAI's ChatGPT and Codex have separate usage limits, unlike Claude which shares limits across variants.

Build American AI, a nonprofit backed by OpenAI and a16z executives, funds influencer campaign promoting U.S. AI while framing Chinese AI as threat.

Reddit discussion questioning lack of realistic voice models despite AI progress; notes OpenAI's unreleased model and Sesame AI limitations.

In the first week of the landmark trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI, Musk took the stand in a crisp black suit and tie and argued that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and president Greg Brockman had deceived him into bankrolling the company. Along the way, he warned that AI could destroy us all and sat…

OpenAI removed AGI trigger clause from Microsoft deal, replacing it with 2032 date limit; enables multi-cloud licensing but signals shift away from founding governance principle.

Reddit speculation on status of rumored OpenAI-Jony Ive hardware/product collaboration; no new information.

The Pentagon has struck deals with OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Nvidia, Elon Musk's xAI, and the startup Reflection, allowing the agency to use their AI tools in classified settings, according to an announcement on Friday. At the same time, the Defense Department has left out Anthropic - which it previously used for classified information - after declaring it a supply-chain risk. This builds upon deals with OpenAI and xAI, which have already reached agreements with the Pentagon for the "lawful" use of their AI systems. A report from The Information suggests Google has struck a similar a...

Elon Musk spent the better part of three days on the witness stand this week in his lawsuit against OpenAI, and it’s already getting messy. Emails, texts, and his own tweets are surfacing in court, and there are plenty more witnesses to come. Musk’s argument against OpenAI? By converting the company to a for-profit model, Sam Altman betrayed the “nonprofit for the […]

Elon Musk is the one who wanted this trial. He has spent months claiming OpenAI "stole a nonprofit," and saying he was the actual driving force behind one of the most important companies currently in tech. All indications are that he won't win his case against the company, but he's fighting it anyway. So you'd think he'd have done better when it was his time to take the stand. Verge subscribers, don't forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Vergecast wherever you get your podcasts. Head here. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here. Instead, Musk spent much of the week arguing with lawyers ...

Elon Musk confirms xAI used distillation from OpenAI models to train Grok, raising questions about training data sourcing practices.

OpenAI Codex CLI 0.128.0 introduces /goal feature enabling autonomous looping until objective completion or token exhaustion.

UK AI Security Institute evaluates GPT-5.5 for cybersecurity vulnerability detection, finding parity with Claude Mythos but with wider availability.

Elon Musk spent three days testifying as the first witness in his trial against OpenAI.

OpenAI will begin rolling out it cybersecurity testing tool, GPT-5.5 Cyber only "to critical cyber defenders" at first.

OpenAI is launching additional opt-in protections for ChatGPT accounts. The new security initiative includes a new partnership with security key provider Yubico.

In a federal courtroom in California on Thursday, Elon Musk testified that his own AI startup, xAI, has used OpenAI's models to improve its own. The matter at question is model distillation, a common industry practice by which one larger AI model acts as a "teacher" of sorts to pass on knowledge to a smaller AI model, the "student." Although it's often used legitimately within companies using one of their own AI models to train another, it's also a practice that's sometimes used by smaller AI labs to try to get their models to mimic the performance of a larger competitor's model. Asked on the...

"Distillation" is a hot topic as frontier labs try to prevent smaller competitors from copying their models.

Court filing alleges xAI distilled OpenAI models; significant if verified but requires legal context confirmation.

Microsoft's relationship with OpenAI has always been complicated, so I expected the close partnership-turned-situationship to end in tears. After all, executive disagreements, rearranged contracts, and frustrations over AI infrastructure have all regularly been part of the partnership, creating plenty of tension along the way. But against all odds, Microsoft and OpenAI divorced this week in a way that looks strangely amicable. Microsoft announced the updates to its long-standing OpenAI deal on Monday, with the most important change allowing OpenAI to make its products and services available a...

System-prompt self-orchestration outperforms external agent frameworks (LangGraph, CrewAI, OpenAI SDK) on procedural tasks; 200 conversation comparison.

OpenAI is opening up about its goblin problem. After a report from Wired revealed instructions to OpenAI's coding model to "never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures," the AI startup published an explanation on its website, calling references to the creatures a "strange habit" its models developed as a result of their training. As outlined in the blog post, OpenAI began noticing metaphors referencing goblins and other creatures starting with its GPT-5.1 model - specifically when using the "Nerdy" personality option. OpenAI says the pro...

Reddit user reports receiving 6 months free ChatGPT Pro subscription; personal anecdote about developer productivity.

OpenAI is preparing to launch a new frontier cybersecurity model, GPT-5.5-Cyber. CEO Sam Altman said the model will not be available to the general public, but will be first rolled out to a select group of trusted "cyber defenders" in order for institutions to shore up their cyberdefenses. The limited rollout will take place "in the next few days," Altman said on X. "We will work with the entire ecosystem and the government to figure out trusted access for Cyber." It's not clear who will get access to the model first, though previous "trusted access" schemes involved vetted professionals and ...