Inside OpenAI’s NSFW Growth Plans

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Israel claims to have killed Iran's security chief, will get the latest.

Plus, Nvidia signals the dawn of a new age of computing, predicting a doubling in AI chip

sales, and will go inside the debate around open AI's not safe for work, growth plans.

Advisors warned that AI-powered erotica could foster these unhealthy emotional dependencies.

They were worried that miners could find their way to access the chap that they risk creating

a, quote, sexy suicide touch.

It's Tuesday, March 17.

I'm Luke Vargas for the Wall Street Journal, and here is the AM edition of What's News,

the top headlines and business stories moving your world today.

Israel says it's killed Iran's security chief, Ali Larajani, in airstrikes last night

on Tehran, according to Defense Minister Israel Katz.

Larajani had emerged as the central figure in Iran's aggressive military response to

U.S.-Israeli airstrikes and played a central role in the killings of anti-raising demonstrators

in January, according to the U.S. government.

Oil and natural gas prices are rising today, that's after an overnight drone strike on

a gas field in the United Arab Emirates, and an attack today on a tanker off the Emirati

coast near a key oil trading hub that lies outside of the Strait of Hormuz.

Meanwhile, the UAE has reopened its airspace after a brief precautionary shutdown earlier

today.

Nevertheless, British Airways said it's extending a suspension of flights to Dubai and other

midi-stest nations until May 31, along with a cancellation of flights to Doha until April

30, skipping the region altogether.

The airline is instead adding more flights directly from London to Bangkok and Singapore.

When Trump has asked China to delay a summit with Xi Jinping in Beijing, originally scheduled

for this month, Trump cited the war in Iran and explaining the requested one-month pushback.

We report that Trump aims to land a trade deal at the summit, while Xi is seeking U.S.

concessions on Taiwan, potentially including the scrapping of planned arms sales to the

island.

Cuba has been plunged into darkness with officials reporting a complete disconnection of its power

grid.

It's Cuba's third nationwide blackout in four months amid a U.S. oil blockade, and

comes as demonstrators have been using the cover of darkness to voice frustration over

dire living conditions.

Speaking at the White House yesterday, President Trump touted the crippling effects of his

blockade, and predicted that he'd have the honor of taking the island.

In a pair of judicial updates, a federal judge in Massachusetts has blocked the Trump

administration from pairing down the list of recommended vaccines for kids, saying that

the government improperly bypassed the technical knowledge and expertise of a vaccine advisory

panel overhauled by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and HHS spokesman said the

department looks forward to the judge's decision being overturned.

And the Supreme Court has agreed to hear arguments on the Trump administration's push to end

legal protections for Haitian and Syrian immigrants.

Arguments are set for the last week of April, with a likely decision this summer, expected

to also affect immigrants from 11 other countries that the administration has moved to expel

from the federal temporary protected status program.

Coming up an exclusive look at OpenAI's strategy to beat out competitors, including controversial

plans for a chatbot with adult features, that and the rest of the day's news after the

break.

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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has unveiled a huge suite of new hardware geared toward running

AI models more quickly and efficiently.

At the company's annual developers event, Huang said the business of AI is now moving

away from training to inference where models answer users and that requires better chips.

To meet that demand, Nvidia has built new server racks, able to compute 350 times faster

than its second-to-last generation of GPUs.

So we believe that this is the future.

This is where AI wants to go.

Huang also said Nvidia expects to sell $1 trillion worth of its blackwell and rubin chips

by the end of 2027, a doubling of its previous guidance.

Meanwhile, we're exclusively reporting that open AI is finalizing plans for a major

strategy pivot in order to focus on dominating the coding and enterprise markets.

Journal Tech reporter Berber Jim says open AI has been facing a tremendous amount of

pressure from anthropic, which has been the go-to platform for software developers and

businesses looking to integrate AI into their workflows.

This is a really interesting moment for open AI because last year, the company was essentially

releasing a new product almost on a monthly cadence.

They announced a new hardware device that they were developing with Johnny Ive.

They announced Sora, which was their standalone social media and video generator app.

They were working on new features inside Touchy PT, including e-commerce and a potential

social network.

So it was really a kind of spread-out strategy that left some employees confused about the

strategic direction of the company.

And this also interestingly comes as the company is preparing for a public listing.

And what you're seeing now is executives really try to instill an added degree of discipline

into the business and to essentially reorient the company around winning a few key

business segments.

Well, another way open AI is looking to make a profit is by catering to adult audiences.

Journal Tech reporter Sam Schechner says the company has been weighing the rollout of

in adult mode.

And he's here to discuss what that would entail and why it's been delayed.

Sam several of open AI's competitors have adult features, chief among them, XAI's

GROC, but also meta in some form.

So why then did talk of open AI pushing into the space elicit as you report a freak out

among its advisors earlier this year?

Well, they floated this idea last year.

And Sam Altman tweeted about it.

He said the company wants to treat adult users like adults.

And the plan has sparked vigorous debate inside the company.

And there's some people who say, you know what?

We shouldn't be in the business of censoring content.

People want to have spicy conversations with a chatbot.

Who are we to say no?

That's one side of the argument.

The other side though, looks at some of the mental health impacts of chatbots already.

There's research showing that extremely heavy users can have some poor impact on their

mental health.

It can have them withdraw from real human connections.

They can have unhealthy emotional dependence.

And the concern internally was that this could supercharge that hijack the brain's emotional

romantic circuitry to get you even more attached to your chatbot.

And how is open AI addressing that concern?

So open AI, as part of their response to some of the mental health issues that have been

laid at its feet, created something called their well-being an AI council that brought

in experts with backgrounds in things like psychology and cognitive neuroscience, also

human computer interaction.

And the plan was to basically consult with them on what they're doing to try to come up

with what would be best for users.

And this group expressed some of those same concerns that we heard internally.

And at a meeting in January when the company told this group this council that they were

moving ahead, advisors, according to our sources, were unanimous and furious.

They warned that AI-powered erotica could foster these unhealthy emotional dependencies that

they were worried that miners could find their way into access to the chat.

That was a major concern.

One of the council members actually warned open AI that they thought that they risk creating

a quote sexy suicide touch.

So Sam, for the time being at least, adult mode is delayed and yet open AI has made

a clear it does plan to release it eventually.

Do we have a sense of what that could look like now that there has been such a big airing

of concerns about the effect of this content?

Well, they have said that they're working on other priorities, but our understanding is

that they are also working on trying to make sure that miners can't get access to this

mode.

They're trying to improve the age prediction algorithm that they use to detect when

they think a user is under 18.

They, first of all, are only talking about text.

They're not going to get into video generation like some of the other platforms out there

when it comes to explicit content.

A spokeswoman for the company described it as smut, not pornography.

They also have certain types of explicit content that they were just going to rule out altogether.

So while you could potentially have chatbot sex with chat GPT, they are aiming to rule

out scenarios involving non-consensual sex or child abuse.

Sam, if there's anyone just listening to this interview and scratching their head and

say, why are the two of them talking about AI chatbot sex?

I think there's a reason you report it on this.

This is something that is getting at some of the bigger debates likely to come up in

tech and in society over the coming years.

I really think that this is one of the many cutting edges of these questions that we're

facing about how to deal with all of the impacts, positive and negative that we're going to

see from AI on not just our economy, our political systems, but also us as individual people.

What do we want from these tools?

And even inside the company like OpenAI, where all those people are obviously incentivized

to want the success of their company, there's not a single point of view.

And I think we all want to get a little bit of a look inside the machine like what is

happening and how are these companies approaching the difficult questions that we're going

to see more and more in the future.

I've been speaking to Wall Street Journal tech reporter Sam Schechner.

Sam, thank you as always.

As always, a pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

And finally, it's St. Patrick's Day today and per tradition that means a White House

visit by Ireland's Prime Minister.

GIFs are a staple of the visit, but correspondent Natalie Andrews says the Prime Minister is expected

to go big this year, bearing a $6.1 billion investment pledge designed to create American

jobs and boost manufacturing.

The investments being announced include five billion over five years from a sustainable

paper packaging company called Smurfit Westrock, a billion dollars from Kingspan, which

is an installation and building company, and then a hundred million dollars in investments

from an nutrition company called Glombia.

Last year, Trump threw a wrench in the historically strong relationship claiming that Ireland was

taking advantage of the U.S. shortly before announcing his Liberation Day tariffs and

a year on trade tensions are likely to remain in focus.

Dublin's tech industry and pharmaceutical industry is booming, and this is something that Donald

Trump has brought up, especially in the pharmaceutical lane.

He spent the last year trying to lower drug prices in the U.S. and lamenting about how

other countries have better deals.

He also wants investment in pharmaceuticals in the U.S.

And so it is a delicate balance.

Donald Trump brings up drug prices and his effort to lower them all the time.

And it's likely something he'll bring up again if he starts talking about trade.

And that's it for what's news for this Tuesday morning.

Additional sound in this episode was from Reuters.

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