Mind Machine AI

Want to cut costs on OpenAI’s audio transcription (gpt-4o) without sacrificing quality? George Mandis discovered a simple yet brilliant hack: speed up your audio with ffmpeg before uploading. Running files at 2x or 3x playback speed slashes the minutes (and dollars) charged, while maintaining near-identical transcript quality—ideal for webinars, interviews, and long recordings. Bonus: it also bypasses model limits that choke on longer real-time files. Smart, scrappy optimisation—exactly the kind of engineering mindset we need more of.

George Mandis

The highly anticipated first episode of the OpenAI Podcast recently dropped, featuring a candid conversation between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and host Andrew Mayne. This premiere offers a deep dive into OpenAI’s current trajectory and future ambitions.

For those tracking the bleeding edge of AI development, Altman’s discussion covers critical topics including the roadmap for GPT-5 ( sometime this summer ) , the pursuit of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), the enigmatic Project Stargate, evolving research workflows, and even the potential implications of AI in parenting.

A recurring sentiment among the initial wave of comments highlights a strong community desire for OpenAI to eschew advertising within their AI products. This feedback underscores a prevalent user expectation for clean, unfettered access to AI tools, drawing parallels to a research-oriented experience.

This inaugural podcast serves as a valuable direct channel for insights from OpenAI’s leadership, providing a glimpse into the strategic thinking behind some of the most impactful AI advancements today.

An engaging essay by Sam Altman on the Singularity being close at hand.

We are past the event horizon; the takeoff has started. Humanity is close to building digital superintelligence, and at least so far it’s much less weird than it seems like it should be.

Sam writes about the cost of chatGPT Query - (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours, about what an oven would use in a little over one second, or a high-efficiency lightbulb would use in a couple of minutes. It also uses about 0.000085 gallons of water; roughly one fifteenth of a teaspoon.)

He envisions a 2030’s decade of abundance driven by intelligence and energy. “We are climbing the long arc of exponential technological progress”

May we scale smoothly, exponentially and uneventfully through superintelligence.

Sam Altman

OpenAI is rolling out GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini to ChatGPT users, following their initial release in the API. GPT-4.1, a specialized model, is now accessible to Plus, Pro, and Team subscribers via the “more models” dropdown, excelling particularly in coding and precise instruction following with the same rate limits as GPT-4o. Simultaneously, the faster and more capable GPT-4.1 mini is replacing GPT-4o mini for all users, serving as the fallback model for free users once their GPT-4o limits are reached, and offers significant improvements in instruction following, coding, and overall intelligence, also maintaining the same rate limits.

OpenAI

OpenAI researcher Dan Roberts at AI Ascent 2025 reveals how reasoning capabilities in AI are evolving, why test-time compute is revolutionizing the field, and the controversial shift to prioritizing reinforcement learning over pre-training.

OpenAI has abandoned its plan to transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit company. Instead, its commercial subsidiary will become a public benefit corporation (PBC) with a new capital structure allowing for unlimited investor returns. The nonprofit board will continue to oversee the PBC, ensuring OpenAI’s mission of benefiting all of humanity remains at the forefront.

The Verge

OpenAI is reportedly working on a new social media platform that could rival X (formerly Twitter), according to insider sources. The experimental app, being quietly developed under the radar, is said to focus on AI-enhanced conversations, blending real-time social interaction with OpenAI’s language models. Though still in early stages, this move hints at OpenAI’s broader ambitions to go beyond AI tools and enter the consumer social networking space—where human-AI interactions might redefine how we connect, share, and engage online.

OpenAI is in talks to acquire Windsurf, an AI coding startup, for approximately $3 billion. This acquisition would be OpenAI’s largest to date and aims to help the company stay ahead in the generative AI race.Windsurf was in talks with investors such as Kleiner Perkins and General Catalyst to raise funding at a $3 billion valuation, the report added.It closed a $150 million funding round led by General Catalyst last year, valuing it at $1.25 billion.

OpenAI released Codex CLI, an open-source tool that translates natural language commands into executable code within terminal environments. It leverages OpenAI’s language models to interpret user inputs and supports multimodal inputs, enhancing its versatility. The tool operates locally, ensuring data privacy and reducing latency, and offers configurable autonomy levels for tailored behavior. To begin using Codex CLI, visit the official GitHub repository for installation instructions and documentation github.com/openai/co…

OpenAI has introduced two advanced models, o3 and o4-mini, emphasizing improved reasoning, multimodal capabilities, and efficiency. The o3 model integrates image analysis into its decision-making process, allowing for operations such as zooming and rotating images within prompts. It also autonomously utilizes tools, including web search, Python code execution, and file analysis, to deliver well-rounded results. This model has established new benchmarks on tests like Codeforces and SWE-bench, surpassing its predecessor, o1. Meanwhile, o4-mini offers cost-effective, high-performance reasoning, excelling in math, coding, and visual tasks, while supporting greater throughput for high-demand applications. Both models are available to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus, Pro, and Team users, and they represent the latest step forward in delivering more sophisticated and practical AI solutions.