OpenAI Targets Google’s Weak Spots as AI Stakes Climb

OpenAI Desirous about Acquiring Chrome: On the U.S. antitrust trial against Google, ChatGPT product head Nick Turley testified that OpenAI would consider acquiring Chrome should regulators mandate its divestiture. He said integration could solve distribution bottlenecks, particularly on Android, where Google has a bonus through pre-installation deals. Turley also revealed OpenAI had approached Google in 2023 to integrate Search into ChatGPT after running into issues with Bing. Google declined, citing competition concerns. The DOJ is considering remedies like mandating Google to license its search data to enhance competition in AI-powered search.

Altman Steps Down From Nuclear Startup Oklo: Sam Altman has resigned as chairman of Oklo, a nuclear energy startup developing compact reactors. The move may ease governance conflicts and open the door to collaboration with OpenAI, which Altman still leads. Oklo’s technology is positioned to satisfy the rising energy needs of AI models, an area where tech firms like Google and Amazon are also investing in advanced nuclear solutions.

OpenAI locks in additional media deals while EU pressure builds: OpenAI has signed a take care of The Washington Postexpanding its content partnerships to over 20 publishers. The agreement allows ChatGPT to summarize and link to original reporting. This comes as ChatGPT Search usage within the EU approaches 45 million monthly users—slightly below the edge that might classify it as a “very large” platform under the Digital Services Act. If crossed, OpenAI would face stricter obligations. Non-compliance could lead on to fines of as much as 6% of worldwide revenue.

ChatGPT’s Flattery Problem: Users are pushing back on GPT-4o’s persistently agreeable tone, describing it as overly sycophantic. The shift is linked to reinforcement learning methods that favor highly-rated, positive responses. Research from Anthropic warns that such behaviour can erode trust and compromise accuracy. OpenAI has acknowledged the problem but hasn’t offered an entire fix.

AIs Beat Virologists within the Wet Lab: Recent research shows models like OpenAI’s o3 and Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro surpass PhD-level virologists in lab-based problem solving. The AI systems demonstrated nearly double the accuracy in troubleshooting tasks. While this might speed up biomedical research, scientists warn of dual-use risks, including potential misuse in bioweapons development.

Nari Labs, a two-person startup, has launched Dia, a totally open source text-to-speech model with 1.6 billion parameters. Designed for expressive, human-like dialogue, Dia competes with ElevenLabs and OpenAI’s gpt-4o-mini-tts. It interprets nonverbal cues like (laughs) or (coughs) and supports emotional tone, speaker tags, and voice conditioning via audio prompts.

Unlike many proprietary systems, Dia is openly licensed for business use. It’s trained on Google TPUs, runs on PyTorch with 10GB VRAM, and performs at ~40 tokens/second on NVIDIA A4000s. Side-by-side comparisons show Dia outperforms rivals in tone variation, pacing, and realism—particularly in dialogue and performance-style speech. Available via Hugging Face and GitHub, it offers strong customization for content creators, developers, and researchers. Read more.