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The walls continue to close in on OpenAI. The company recently raised an additional $10 billion in funding, bringing its valuation one small step closer to $1 trillion.
But actually making any money continues to be an enormous challenge for the ChatGPT maker. The company’s panicked executives have made it abundantly clear that distracting “side quests” must be abandoned, while doubling down on both enterprise and coding. The purported goal is to stuff all of its offerings into a single “super app,” taking a page out of xAI CEO Elon Musk’s playbook.
These aren’t empty words by OpenAI execs. First, news emerged this week that the company is killing its disastrous Sora video AI slop app, lighting what was supposed to be a groundbreaking $1 billion deal with Disney on fire.
Now, the company is axing its spicy “adult mode” chatbot, as the Financial Times reports, once again highlighting how much pressure the company is under as competitors aren’t just catching up, but snatching up precious paying customers from right under its nose.
According to the FT, OpenAI has since confirmed that the chatbot, which CEO Sam Altman characterized as “erotica for verified adults” in an October tweet, is on hold indefinitely. The company claims it wants to buy itself more time to figure out the long-term effects of hosting such a bot.
That’s perhaps for the best, given the ongoing discussions surrounding AI psychosis, a troubling trend that has caused an alarming wave of mental health crises as the tech coaxes some users into spirals of paranoid and delusional behavior.
OpenAI first openly discussed opening the floodgates for “mature apps” last fall, wtih Altman promising to “treat adult users like adults.”
Altman also claimed in his October tweet that OpenAI had been able to “mitigate the serious mental health issues,” despite a wealth of evidence to the contrary.
Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal reported that company advisors had grown wary of the feature and the many potential risks of letting OpenAI’s already-hooked customers engage in intimately-charged conversations.
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