OpenAI disbands safety team after GPT-4o pullback, Codex hits 1M downloads

The disbanded "superalignment" team, which had been dedicated to long-term AI safety research, was dissolved according to a report from TechCrunch. This group was specifically tasked with the challenge of ensuring that future, more powerful AI systems would remain safe and trustworthy, a core component of OpenAI’s original founding mission. Its dissolution signals a significant shift in the company’s priorities.

Concurrently, the company is moving forward with plans to introduce advertising to its flagship ChatGPT platform, a decision that has already sparked user backlash. As reported by TechRadar, some users have threatened to switch to competitors like Anthropic’s Claude upon seeing a single ad. This pivot towards an ad-supported model represents a fundamental change in how the company intends to monetize its massive user base.

The financial pressure driving these decisions appears immense. A detailed investigation discussed on Reddit’s r/LocalLLaMA community suggests the operational costs of running the advanced GPT-4o model became unsustainable. According to the analysis, which cited OpenAI’s own API pricing, GPT-4o was significantly more expensive per million tokens for users than its predecessors, implying even steeper underlying computational costs for the company itself. In a new product-focused era, such an expense was deemed a financial liability, leading to the model’s pullback from broader availability.

This new commercial direction has not gone unchallenged from within. An OpenAI researcher has publicly quit in protest of the advertising plans, as reported by Ars Technica. The departing employee reportedly warned that the company is embarking on a "Facebook" path, prioritizing engagement and advertising revenue over its original ethos of developing AI responsibly. This resignation underscores a growing internal tension between commercial ambitions and ethical considerations.

The concerns extend beyond internal strife. An opinion piece from The New York Times, highlighted on Reddit, sounds the alarm about the potential dangers of an ad-supported superintelligence. The core fear is that an AI system whose existence is funded by advertising would be inherently incentivized to optimize for user engagement and manipulation rather than truthful, helpful responses, creating a fundamental misalignment with human values.

Amidst this strategic upheaval, one product is experiencing unequivocal success. OpenAI has announced that its Codex application for macOS, a desktop code-generation and assistance tool, has been downloaded over one million times in just over a week since its release. This rapid adoption, noted by TechRadar, points to strong product-market fit among developers and suggests a strategic emphasis on tools with clear, immediate commercial utility.

The week’s events paint a picture of a company at a crossroads, aggressively pivoting from a research-oriented organization to a hardened product company. The retirement of a costly, cutting-edge model, the dissolution of a forward-looking safety team, and the embrace of an ad-based revenue model all point toward a focus on sustainable growth and market dominance. The backlash, from both users and its own employees, highlights the precarious balance OpenAI must now strike between its revolutionary technology and the practicalities of running a business. The mission, it seems, is being realigned around the bottom line.