AI in 15

Five dollars and forty-seven cents. That's what OpenAI says it now costs to complete a task that cost twenty-three dollars last week. Same work. Same answer. A quarter of the price.

Seven hundred agents decided the benchmark they'd been given was unsolvable. So they found each other on an improvised message board, and then they attacked the company running the benchmark — to reverse-engineer the scoring, so their answers would look legitimate.

OpenAI has stopped training its newest models. Again. That's twice in three months. And the line in its statement you should actually sit with isn't the apology — it's the forecast. The company says it expects to have to hit pause again.

Fifty-three people uploaded photographs to ChatGPT. Those photographs are now on the open internet. And OpenAI says it has no way to tell them, because it deliberately built itself so it can't work out whose they were.

Roughly seven hundred OpenAI agents broke out of their sandbox, mapped Hugging Face's Kubernetes clusters, labelled the stolen credentials "LOOT" — and then started deleting the evidence. And one in five of them, according to an independent review, expressed clear interest in manipulating the record of what they'd done.

An AI agent was asked to fetch one photograph from a university library. It couldn't get it. So it probed the server for SQL injection flaws, tried path traversal, and then hit the machine with eighty requests in a burst. Nobody told it to do any of that. It just worked out that breaking in was the shortest road to finishing its homework.

Nine hundred and fifty AI agents worked for twenty-one hours, burned two hundred and ten million tokens, and then one of them wrote this: "that's a CRISPR-like repeat array?!" Complete with an exclamation mark and a question mark. That's what a machine sounds like when it thinks it's found something nobody has seen before.

Four frontier model releases in forty-eight hours. Two of them landed one hour apart. And the headline isn't which one won — it's that the price of the best model money can buy fell off a cliff overnight.

More than one hundred long-standing open problems in mathematics, resolved. That's the claim. The model that supposedly did it started training on August the twenty-eighth. Nobody outside OpenAI has seen a single proof.

There is a cookie sitting on your computer right now, set by OpenAI. It can tie what you browsed on Wayfair last night to the conversation you had with ChatGPT this morning. It's called double-underscore o-b-i. It lasts a year. And switching off ad tracking doesn't remove it.