Inside OpenAI’s NSFW Growth Plans

0:00As a chef, I know flavor does begin in the kitchen. It begins on the land. And Westome's nature-led Australian wagyu is a story written in the landscape of Northern Australia. Cooking is storytelling, and Westome wagyu carries a story of Northern Australia itself. Raw, powerful, and deeply authentic. As a testament to the passion and care raised in the rhythm of Northern Australia, I'm Chef Maylin from ADA Club in Los Angeles, and I invite you to visit westhome.com slash Maylin to learn more. And taste a story, only Westome nature-led Australian wagyu can tell. That's W-E-S-T-H-O-L-M-E.com slash M-E-I-L-I-N. Israel claims to have killed Iran's security chief, will get the latest. Plus, Nvidia signals the dawn of a new age of computing, predicting a doubling in AI chip

1:03sales, and will go inside the debate around open AI's not safe for work, growth plans. Advisors warned that AI-powered erotica could foster these unhealthy emotional dependencies. They were worried that miners could find their way to access the chap that they risk creating a, quote, sexy suicide touch. It's Tuesday, March 17. I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories moving your world today. Israel says it's killed Iran's security chief, Ali Larajani, in airstrikes last night on Tehran, according to Defense Minister Israel Katz. Larajani had emerged as the central figure in Iran's aggressive military response to U.S.-Israeli airstrikes and played a central role in the killings of anti-raising demonstrators in January, according to the U.S. government. Oil and natural gas prices are rising today, that's after an overnight drone strike on

2:04a gas field in the United Arab Emirates, and an attack today on a tanker off the Emirati coast near a key oil trading hub that lies outside of the Strait of Hormuz. Meanwhile, the UAE has reopened its airspace after a brief precautionary shutdown earlier today. Nevertheless, British Airways said it's extending a suspension of flights to Dubai and other midi-stest nations until May 31, along with a cancellation of flights to Doha until April 30, skipping the region altogether. The airline is instead adding more flights directly from London to Bangkok and Singapore. When Trump has asked China to delay a summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing, originally scheduled for this month, Trump cited the war in Iran and explaining the requested one-month pushback. We report that Trump aims to land a trade deal at the summit, while Xi is seeking U.S. concessions on Taiwan, potentially including the scrapping of planned arms sales to the

3:05island. Cuba has been plunged into darkness with officials reporting a complete disconnection of its power grid. It's Cuba's third nationwide blackout in four months amid a U.S. oil blockade, and comes as demonstrators have been using the cover of darkness to voice frustration over dire living conditions. Speaking at the White House yesterday, President Trump touted the crippling effects of his blockade, and predicted that he'd have the honor of taking the island. In a pair of judicial updates, a federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the Trump administration from pairing down the list of recommended vaccines for kids, saying that the government improperly bypassed the technical knowledge and expertise of a vaccine advisory panel overhauled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and HHS spokesman said the

4:09department looks forward to the judge's decision being overturned. And the Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on the Trump administration's push to end legal protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants. Arguments are set for the last week of April, with a likely decision this summer, expected to also affect immigrants from 11 other countries that the administration has moved to expel from the federal temporary protected status program. Coming up an exclusive look at OpenAI's strategy to beat out competitors, including controversial plans for a chatbot with adult features, that and the rest of the day's news after the break. Exima is unpredictable, but you can flare less with eggless, a once-monthly treatment for moderate-disappear exima. Here in initial four-month or longer dosing phase, about four and ten people taking eggless, achieved itch relief and glare are almost glare skin at 16 weeks. And most of those people maintain skin that's still more glare at one year, with monthly dosing.

5:09Hempless, LibriKizumap, LBKZ, a 250-milligram per 2-milliliter injection is a prescription medicine used to treat adults and children 12 years of age and older who weigh at least 88 pounds or 40 kilograms with moderate-to-severe exima. Also called atopic dermatitis that is not well controlled with prescription therapies used on the skin, or topicals, or who cannot use topical therapies. LibriKizumap can be used with or without topical corticosteroids. Don't use if you're allergic to ebglyss, allergic reactions can occur that can be severe. Eye problems can occur. Tell your doctor if you have new or worsening eye problems. You should not receive a live vaccine when treated with ebglyss. Before starting ebglyss, tell your doctor if you have a parasitic infection. Ask a doctor about ebglyss and visit ebglyss.lily.com or call 1-800-LilyRx or 1-800-545-5979. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has unveiled a huge suite of new hardware geared toward running AI models more quickly and efficiently. At the company's annual developers event, Huang said the business of AI is now moving away from training to inference where models answer users and that requires better chips.

6:11To meet that demand, Nvidia has built new server racks, able to compute 350 times faster than its second-to-last generation of GPUs. So we believe that this is the future. This is where AI wants to go. Huang also said Nvidia expects to sell $1 trillion worth of its blackwell and rubin chips by the end of 2027, a doubling of its previous guidance. Meanwhile, we're exclusively reporting that open AI is finalizing plans for a major strategy pivot in order to focus on dominating the coding and enterprise markets. Journal Tech reporter Berber Jim says open AI has been facing a tremendous amount of pressure from anthropic, which has been the go-to platform for software developers and businesses looking to integrate AI into their workflows. This is a really interesting moment for open AI because last year, the company was essentially releasing a new product almost on a monthly cadence. They announced a new hardware device that they were developing with Johnny Ive. They announced Sora, which was their standalone social media and video generator app.

7:14They were working on new features inside Touchy PT, including e-commerce and a potential social network. So it was really a kind of spread-out strategy that left some employees confused about the strategic direction of the company. And this also interestingly comes as the company is preparing for a public listing. And what you're seeing now is executives really try to instill an added degree of discipline into the business and to essentially reorient the company around winning a few key business segments. Well, another way open AI is looking to make a profit is by catering to adult audiences. Journal Tech reporter Sam Schechner says the company has been weighing the rollout of in adult mode. And he's here to discuss what that would entail and why it's been delayed. Sam several of open AI's competitors have adult features, chief among them, XAI's GROC, but also meta in some form. So why then did talk of open AI pushing into the space elicit as you report a freak out

8:16among its advisors earlier this year? Well, they floated this idea last year. And Sam Altman tweeted about it. He said the company wants to treat adult users like adults. And the plan has sparked vigorous debate inside the company. And there's some people who say, you know what? We shouldn't be in the business of censoring content. People want to have spicy conversations with a chatbot. Who are we to say no? That's one side of the argument. The other side though, looks at some of the mental health impacts of chatbots already. There's research showing that extremely heavy users can have some poor impact on their mental health. It can have them withdraw from real human connections. They can have unhealthy emotional dependence. And the concern internally was that this could supercharge that hijack the brain's emotional romantic circuitry to get you even more attached to your chatbot. And how is open AI addressing that concern?

9:17So open AI, as part of their response to some of the mental health issues that have been laid at its feet, created something called their well-being an AI council that brought in experts with backgrounds in things like psychology and cognitive neuroscience, also human computer interaction. And the plan was to basically consult with them on what they're doing to try to come up with what would be best for users. And this group expressed some of those same concerns that we heard internally. And at a meeting in January when the company told this group this council that they were moving ahead, advisors, according to our sources, were unanimous and furious. They warned that AI-powered erotica could foster these unhealthy emotional dependencies that they were worried that miners could find their way into access to the chat. That was a major concern. One of the council members actually warned open AI that they thought that they risk creating

10:17a quote sexy suicide touch. So Sam, for the time being at least, adult mode is delayed and yet open AI has made a clear it does plan to release it eventually. Do we have a sense of what that could look like now that there has been such a big airing of concerns about the effect of this content? Well, they have said that they're working on other priorities, but our understanding is that they are also working on trying to make sure that miners can't get access to this mode. They're trying to improve the age prediction algorithm that they use to detect when they think a user is under 18. They, first of all, are only talking about text. They're not going to get into video generation like some of the other platforms out there when it comes to explicit content. A spokeswoman for the company described it as smut, not pornography. They also have certain types of explicit content that they were just going to rule out altogether. So while you could potentially have chatbot sex with chat GPT, they are aiming to rule

11:20out scenarios involving non-consensual sex or child abuse. Sam, if there's anyone just listening to this interview and scratching their head and say, why are the two of them talking about AI chatbot sex? I think there's a reason you report it on this. This is something that is getting at some of the bigger debates likely to come up in tech and in society over the coming years. I really think that this is one of the many cutting edges of these questions that we're facing about how to deal with all of the impacts, positive and negative that we're going to see from AI on not just our economy, our political systems, but also us as individual people. What do we want from these tools? And even inside the company like OpenAI, where all those people are obviously incentivized to want the success of their company, there's not a single point of view. And I think we all want to get a little bit of a look inside the machine like what is happening and how are these companies approaching the difficult questions that we're going

12:23to see more and more in the future. I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal tech reporter Sam Schechner. Sam, thank you as always. As always, a pleasure. Thanks for having me. And finally, it's St. Patrick's Day today and per tradition that means a White House visit by Ireland's Prime Minister. GIFs are a staple of the visit, but correspondent Natalie Andrews says the Prime Minister is expected to go big this year, bearing a $6.1 billion investment pledge designed to create American jobs and boost manufacturing. The investments being announced include five billion over five years from a sustainable paper packaging company called Smurfit Westrock, a billion dollars from Kingspan, which is an installation and building company, and then a hundred million dollars in investments from an nutrition company called Glombia. Last year, Trump threw a wrench in the historically strong relationship claiming that Ireland was taking advantage of the U.S. shortly before announcing his Liberation Day tariffs and a year on trade tensions are likely to remain in focus.

13:24Dublin's tech industry and pharmaceutical industry is booming, and this is something that Donald Trump has brought up, especially in the pharmaceutical lane. He spent the last year trying to lower drug prices in the U.S. and lamenting about how other countries have better deals. He also wants investment in pharmaceuticals in the U.S. And so it is a delicate balance. Donald Trump brings up drug prices and his effort to lower them all the time. And it's likely something he'll bring up again if he starts talking about trade. And that's it for what's news for this Tuesday morning. Additional sound in this episode was from Reuters. The future of everything is the Wall Street Journal's flagship live event. Returning to New York City May 4th through 5th, be there as CEOs, policymakers, and innovators

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