Employees from some of the world’s leading AI companies published an unusual proposal on Tuesday, demanding that the companies grant them “a right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence.” 

Whom do they want to warn? You. The public. Anyone who will listen. 

The 13 signatories are current and former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind. They believe AI has huge potential to do good, but they’re worried that without proper safeguards, the tech can enable a wide range of harms.

A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created.

The group, which includes nine current and former OpenAI employees, has rallied in recent days around shared concerns that the company has not done enough to prevent its A.I. systems from becoming dangerous.

OpenAI on Tuesday said it created a safety and security committee led by senior executives, after disbanding its previous oversight board in mid-May.

The new committee will be responsible for recommending to OpenAI’s board “critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations,” the company said.

News of the new committee comes as the developer of the ChatGPT virtual assistant announced that it has begun training its “next frontier model.”

It’s the most interesting tech scandal in recent memory: Actress Scarlett Johansson accused OpenAI of deliberately — and creepily — copying her voice to make ChatGPT sound like her AI character in the movie Her.

OpenAI denied this and has paused the feature, but it has sparked widespread outrage, with the union representing Hollywood actors and other artists on Tuesday urging Congress to pass legislation to protect people like Johansson.

On Friday, Vox reported that employees at tech giant OpenAI who wanted to leave the company were confronted with expansive and highly restrictive exit documents. If they refused to sign in relatively short order, they were reportedly threatened with the loss of their vested equity in the company — a severe provision that's fairly uncommon in Silicon Valley. The policy had the effect of forcing ex-employees to choose between giving up what could be millions of dollars they had already earned or agreeing not to criticize the company, with no end date.

Wall Street Journal owner News Corp struck a major content-licensing pact with the generative artificial-intelligence company OpenAI, aiming to cash in on a technology that promises to have a profound impact on the news-publishing industry. 

Sixteen companies at the forefront of developing Artificial Intelligence pledged on Tuesday at a global meeting to develop the technology safely at a time when regulators are scrambling to keep up with rapid innovation and emerging risks.

Days before OpenAI demonstrated its new, flirty voice assistant last week, the actress Scarlett Johansson said, Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, called her agent and asked that she consider licensing her voice for a virtual assistant.

It was his second request to the actress in the past year, Ms. Johannson said in a statement on Monday, adding that the reply both times was no.

OpenAI has announced the latest version of the AI model powering ChatGPT, revealing the AI can now handle real-time voice and video chats with users.

Called GPT-4o, it is a more advanced version of the existing GPT-4 model, and OpenAI said it would roll out to users over the next few weeks. The most significant update is the ability for users to talk in real-time with ChatGPT — it can respond in 320 milliseconds on average, OpenAI said, which makes for more natural interactions.