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 OpenAI plans to start testing ads inside of ChatGPT "in the coming weeks." In a blog post published Friday, the company said adult users in the US of its free and Go tiers (more on the latter in a moment) would start seeing sponsored products and services appear below their conversations with its chatbot. "Ads will be clearly labeled and separated from the organic answer," OpenAI said, adding any sponsored spots would not influence the answers ChatGPT generates. "Answers are optimized based on what's most helpful to you."
OpenAI says people won't see ads appear when they're talking to ChatGPT about sensitive subjects like their health, mental state of mind or current politics. The company also won't show ads to teens under the age of 18. As for privacy, OpenAI states it won't share or sell your data with advertisers. The company will also give users the option to disable ad personalization and clear the data it uses to generate sponsored responses. "We'll always offer a way to not see ads in ChatGPT, including a paid tier that's ad-free," OpenAI adds. Users can dismiss ads, at which point they'll be asked to explain why they didn't engage with it.
Users will be able to ask follow-up questions about sponsored content. OpenAI"Given what AI can do, we're excited to develop new experiences over time that people find more helpful and relevant than any other ads. Conversational interfaces create p
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Leaders at Mira Murati's startup believe Barret Zoph engaged in an incident of "serious misconduct." The details are now coming to light.
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Canada has agreed to drastically reduce its tariffs on imported Chinese EVs from 100 percent to 6.1 percent as part of a new deal between the two countries. In return, China will be reducing tariffs on Canadian canola seeds from 84 percent to about 15 percent.
The move is a break from the United States, which maintains a 100 percent tariff on EVs from China, effectively banning them in the country. Mexico currently tariffs the vehicles at 50 percent after increasing its rate last year.
Under the agreement, which Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney called "preliminary," Canada will allow up to 49,000 Chinese EVs into the country, with that number rising to 70,000 after five years. Until now the three major North American trading partners had been aligned in trying to protect their domestic electric vehicle manufacturing. Chinese EV companies benefit from state subsidies, and as such can often be priced at a far better value than domestic alternatives.
"Our relationship has progressed in recent months with China. It is more predictable and you see results coming from that," Carney said to reporters. A warmer relationship may be forming in response to the Trump administration's
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Two co-founders, Barret Zoph and Luke Metz, are heading back to OpenAI, alongside Sam Schoenholz, another former OpenAI staffer who had joined the startup.
The post Thinking Machines Lab Loses Key Leaders as They Return to OpenAI appeared first on eWEEK.
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 While the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max are not expected to launch for another eight months, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
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X says it is changing its policies around Grok's image-editing abilities following a multi-week outcry over the chatbot repeatedly being accused of generating sexualized images of children and nonconsensual nudity. In an update shared from the @Safety account on X, the company said it has "implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis."
The new safeguards, according to X, will apply to all users regardless of whether they pay for Grok. xAI is also moving all of Grok's image-generating features behind its subscriber paywall so that non-paying users will no longer be able to create images. And it will geoblock "the ability of all users to generate images of real people in bikinis, underwear, and similar attire via the Grok account and in Grok in X" in regions where it's illegal.
— Safety (@Safety) January 14, 2026
The company's statement comes hours after the state of California opened an investigation into xAI and Grok over its handling of AI-generated nudity and child exploitation material. A statement from California Attorney General Rob Bonta cited one analysis that found "more than half of the 20,000 images generated by xAI between Christmas and New Years depicted people in minimal clothing," including some that appeared to be children.
In its update, X said that it has "zero tolerance" for child exploitation and that it removes "high-priority violative content, including Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM) and non-
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 Verizon is experiencing a major outage across the U.S. today, with hundreds of thousands of customers reporting issues with the network on the website Downdetector. There are also complaints across Reddit and other social media platforms.
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 Apple and other smartphone manufacturers are resisting an Indian government proposal that would require them to hand over source code for security review, reports Reuters.
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