All of the updates from OpenAI Dev Day 2025
10 min read
OpenAI, founded in 2015 to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI) — AI systems with human-level intelligence — has transformed dramatically since launching ChatGPT, which was once considered “the fastest-growing consumer application in history.” Since then, controversies have swirled over everything: whether Sam Altman should be CEO, chatbot safety, the environmental impact of AI datacenters, an ongoing feud with Elon Musk, and even how much glaze is too much or too little for new products like GPT-5.
Now, at its Dev Day 2025 event, we’ll be looking for updates on its project to develop consumer AI hardware with Jony Ive, potential changes for the Sora video generator and social app, its rumored browser project, and the next step for ChatGPT after the launch of features like Pulse.
All of the news and updates about OpenAI continue below.
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I’m on the ground at OpenAI’s annual event, DevDay.
The San Francisco event will kick off with a keynote by CEO Sam Altman, followed by a media Q&A with OpenAI executives like Greg Brockman and Brad Lightcap, a developer state of the union, and a closing fireside chat between Altman and famed former Apple designer Jony Ive.
No word yet on exactly what will be announced, but we may hear updates about the buzzy AI device OpenAI is building with Ive and his team, as well as how OpenAI could change Sora, its new social media app for AI-generated video.
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Collabs with fictional characters are on the horizon for Sora. Officially, that is, as OpenAI moves to restrict the flow of unauthorized horrors like meth-cooking and Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pokémon that have plagued the platform from day one.
Bill Peebles, leader of the Sora team at OpenAI, said fictional character appearances in videos, known as cameos, are “on the roadmap,” with details hopefully dropping “soon,” teasing a sanctioned way to use copyrighted characters on the platform.
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Sora now lets you rein in your AI doubles, giving you more say on how and where deepfake versions of you make an appearance on the app. The update lands as OpenAI hurries to show it actually cares about its users’ concerns as an all-too-predictable tsunami of AI slop threatens to take over the internet.
The new controls are part of a broader batch of weekend updates meant to stabilize Sora and manage the chaos brewing in its feed. Sora is essentially “a TikTok for deepfakes,” a place to make 10-second videos of pretty much anything, including AI-generated versions of yourself or others (voice included). OpenAI calls these virtual appearances “cameos.” Critics call them a looming misinformation disaster.
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An anime version of Jesus Christ flipping tables. OpenAI employees performing in Hamilton costumes. News anchors discussing a story on television. A man doing a thirst-trap TikTok dance. Sam Altman — stealing GPUs on CCTV, listening to a business pitch, crying.
Such were the contents of my feed on Sora, OpenAI’s new social media app for AI-generated video. The company released the iOS app on Tuesday with the ability to create 10-second videos of virtually anything you can dream up, including “cameos,” or videos featuring your own AI-generated self and anyone else who approves of you using their likeness. OpenAI employees called Sora a potential “ChatGPT moment for video generation” in a briefing with reporters earlier this week. On Friday, Sora topped the list for top free apps in Apple’s App Store.
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OpenAI has rolled out some long-awaited parental controls for ChatGPT to all web users, with mobile coming “soon,” according to the company.
The controls, announced last month, allow for reducing or removing certain content — like sexual roleplay and the ability to generate images — and reducing the level of personalization on ChatGPT conversations by turning off its memory of past transcripts.
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OpenAI’s latest personalization play for ChatGPT: You can now allow the chatbot to learn about you via your transcripts and phone activity (think: connected apps like your calendar, email, and Google Contacts), and based on that data, it’ll research things it thinks you’ll like and present you with a daily “pulse” on them.
The new mobile feature, called ChatGPT Pulse, is only available to Pro users for now, ahead of a broader rollout. The personalized research comes your way in the form of “topical visual cards you can scan quickly or open for more detail, so each day starts with a new, focused set of updates,” per the company. That can look like Formula One race updates, daily vocabulary lessons for a language you’re learning, menu advice for a dinner you’re attending that evening, and more.
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One of the mysterious AI devices that OpenAI is considering developing with Apple’s former chief design officer, Jony Ive, “resembles a smart speaker without a display,” The Information reports. People “with direct knowledge of the matter” told the publication that OpenAI has already secured a contract with Luxshare, and has also approached Goertek — two of Apple’s product assemblers — to supply components like speaker modules for its future lineup of AI gadgets.
OpenAI has also considered building glasses, a digital voice recorder, and a wearable pin, according to sources speaking to The Information, with the first products being targeted for release in late 2026 or early 2027.
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OpenAI this week released what it says is the largest study yet of how people are using ChatGPT, revealing fresh insights on who is using the technology and what they are using it for.
The big surprise was finding out that most ChatGPT chats aren’t about work. In June 2025, 73 percent of ChatGPT messages were non-work related, up from 53 percent a year earlier, the 62-page report said.
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Elon Musk is suing Apple and OpenAI over claims that their deal to build ChatGPT into the iPhone is stifling competition in the AI industry. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, the Musk-owned X Corp. and xAI also accuse Apple’s Apple Store of “deprioritizing” rival chatbots and “super” apps, including Grok and X.
Musk’s companies claim that iPhone users “have no reason” to download third-party AI apps because the company “force[s]” users to use ChatGPT as their default chatbot app when enabling Apple Intelligence. “Apple and OpenAI have locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing,” the companies allege.
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Last week, on GPT-5 launch day, AI hype was at an all-time high.
In a press briefing beforehand, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said GPT-5 is “something that I just don’t wanna ever have to go back from,” a milestone akin to the first iPhone with a Retina display. The night before the announcement livestream, Altman posted an image of the Death Star, building even more hype. On X, one user wrote that the anticipation “feels like christmas eve.” All eyes were on the ChatGPT-maker as people across industries waited to see if the publicity would deliver or disappoint. And by most accounts, the big reveal would fall short.
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The head of ChatGPT was “surprised” by how much people were attached to GPT-4o. -
OpenAI has officially closed its nearly $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famed former Apple designer Jony Ive, the company announced Wednesday. But it was careful to only refer to the startup as io Products Inc.
The blog post initially announcing the acquisition was also scrubbed from OpenAI’s website due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.
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OpenAI’s next DevDay is set for October. -
Thanks to a related trademark lawsuit, we know what OpenAI and Jony Ive’s first AI device won’t be.
In court filings submitted this month, leaders from io — the consumer hardware team OpenAI recently acquired from Jony Ive’s design studio for $6.5 billion — testified that the first device they plan to release won’t be an “in-ear device” or a “wearable.” They also say the AI device won’t ship until “at least” 2026.
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OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware.
OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.
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OpenAI’s ChatGPT service was down all day for many users after the platform started experiencing performance issues on Tuesday morning. The chatbot responded with a “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong” error message to my colleague after failing to load, and users across X and Reddit are reporting platform outages.
Downdetector showed that issues started at around 3AM ET, with multiple regions impacted globally. OpenAI’s own status page said that some users started experiencing “elevated error rates and latency” at that time, noting that the issues were affecting ChatGPT, its Sora text-to-video AI tool, and OpenAI APIs. OpenAI added a separate line for “elevated error rates on Sora” at 5:23AM ET, and later updated the status for both to “partial outage.”
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There’s going to be a movie about OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s ouster (and subsequent rehire).
Luca Guadagnino is in talks to direct, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with Andrew Garfield in talks to play Sam Altman. Production could begin as soon as this summer, per the report, with filming locations in San Francisco and Italy.
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The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other’s heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week’s I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode.
This time, OpenAI dropped its bombshell the day after.
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The last 48 hours have been a wild rollercoaster ride for AI hardware. On Tuesday, Google ended its I/O keynote — a roughly two-hour event with copious references to AI — with its vision for Android XR glasses. That included flashy partnerships with Gentle Monster and Warby Parker, as well as the first hands-on opportunity with its prototype glasses for the developers and the majority of tech media alike. On the ground, it was among the buzziest things to come out of Google I/O — a glimpse of what Big Tech thinks is the winning AI hardware formula.
A day later, Jony Ive and Sam Altman kicked down the door and told Google, “Hold my beer.”
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OpenAI is buying io, a hardware company founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and several other former engineers from his time there, including Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan.
Ive won’t be joining OpenAI, and his design firm, LoveFrom, will continue to be independent, but they will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion, Bloomberg reports.
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If Google is forced to sell off Chrome, ChatGPT’s head of product told a judge today that OpenAI would be interested in buying the browser, Reuters reports.
Google breaking off Chrome is a proposed remedy by the US Department of Justice in US v. Google, in which Judge Amit Mehta ruled last year that the company is a monopolist in online search. The remedies phase of the trial began on Monday. Google plans to appeal the ruling.
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OpenAI has revealed the “advisors” for its new nonprofit commission: Dolores Huerta, Monica Lozano, Dr. Robert K. Ross, and Jack Oliver. The company says the four advisors will help “inform OpenAI’s philanthropic efforts,” according to an announcement on Tuesday.
Huerta was a prominent labor activist during the 20th century, while Lozano was the president and CEO of the College Futures Foundation and is a member of Apple’s board of directors. Ross previously served as president and CEO of the health and wellness foundation The California Endowment, and OpenAI says Oliver is a “leader in government, technology, business and advocacy.”
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OpenAI is working on its own X-like social network, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter.
While the project is still in early stages, we’re told there’s an internal prototype focused on ChatGPT’s image generation that has a social feed. CEO Sam Altman has been privately asking outsiders for feedback about the project, our sources say. It’s unclear if OpenAI’s plan is to release the social network as a separate app or integrate it into ChatGPT, which became the most downloaded app globally last month. An OpenAI spokesperson didn’t respond in time for publication.
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OpenAI has introduced GPT-4.1, a successor to the GPT-4o multimodal AI model launched by the company last year. During a livestream on Monday, OpenAI said GPT-4.1 has an even larger context window and is better than GPT-4o in “just about every dimension,” with big improvements to coding and instruction following.
GPT-4.1 is now available to developers, along with two smaller model versions. That includes GPT-4.1 Mini, which, like its predecessor, is more affordable for developers to tinker with, and GPT-4.1 Nano, an even more lightweight model that OpenAI says is its “smallest, fastest, and cheapest” one yet.
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OpenAI will reveal GPT-4.1 this afternoon.
Update: Added livestream details.
