Latest news with #Altman-run
India.com
a day ago
- Business
- India.com
What's common between Sam Altman, the ChatGPT founder and Sundar Pichai, the man behind Google's success? Both went to...
Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai- PTI image Sam Altman vs Sundar Pichai: Two of the most popular names that are often taken with high respect in the technology world today are Open AI CEO Sam Altman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Both Sam Altman and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have earned fame in the technology world for their respective innovations in the technology world. While Sam Altman built a chatbot named ChatGPT, Sundar Pichai built a browser that reached almost every phone and laptop named Google Chrome. However, do you know that both the tech leaders share a common point in their academic lives. What's common between Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai? As per media reports, both Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai attended Stanford University, a key commonality in their careers. For those unversed, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a private research university in Stanford, California, United States. The university is also known as the Hogwarts of Silicon Valley, is famous for producing technology stalwarts. Who are Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai? Sam Altman is a Stanford dropout who went on to co-found Y Combinator and later become the CEO of OpenAI, a company that transformed the Artificial Intelligence world with the launch of ChatGPT. On the other hand, Sundar Pichai belongs from a modest family of Chennai, India. He earned advanced degrees (MS and MBA) after studying engineering. Sundar progressed through Google—from leading Chrome's development to becoming CEO of Google and eventually Alphabet. OpenAI continues to be overseen and controlled by nonprofit: Sam Altman Sam Altman-run OpenAI will continue to be overseen and controlled by the nonprofit and its 'for profit LLC' will transition to a public benefit corporation (PBC), giving the nonprofit better resources to support several benefits, the company has announced. OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit, and is today overseen and controlled by that nonprofit. 'Going forward, it will continue to be overseen and controlled by that nonprofit. Our for-profit LLC, which has been under the nonprofit since 2019, will transition to a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC)–a purpose-driven company structure that has to consider the interests of both shareholders and the mission,' the ChatGPT maker said in a statement. (With inputs from agencies)
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI Is Taking Spammers' Money to Pollute the Internet at Unprecedented Scale
Sam Altman's grand vision of democratizing artificial intelligence seems, per a new study, to include an ugly asterisk: it's monetized, at least in part, by spambots filling the web with AI-generated garbage. According to the cybersecurity firm SentinelOne, search engine optimization (SEO) scammers operated undetected for months using what company's experts are calling "AkiraBot," a "modular and sophisticated" tool that was able to bypass CAPTCHAs and other spam detection filters with ease. As SentinelOne explained, the bot was named not for any affiliation with the ransomware group Akira, but because that name, which means "bright" in Japanese, is used in a lot of the creators' affiliated domains. AkiraBot's bottom line seems to be directing traffic to its dubious SEO scheme — and with GPT-4o-mini, that process seems to have been automated at scale. Having attempted to spam roughly 420,000 sites and successfully getting its trash through to some 80,000, the humans behind AkiraBot were almost certainly paying for access to OpenAI's API — and we've reached out to the Altman-run company to confirm. The bot's chief targets, per SentinelOne's investigation, were small and medium-sized businesses — and specifically, the contact forms and chat widgets on those companies' websites. Using GPT-4o-mini to craft templates based on whichever type of contact module was at play, the spammers customized unique messages for each website in ways that got around spam filters at least part of the time. Starting with instructions that tell OpenAI's most cost-efficient advanced model to act like a "helpful assistant that generates marketing messages," the bots' creators operated for months before SentinelOne got wise to its spam scam. In one example of an AkiraBot message from a targeted candle company's comments section, a phony customer service rep named "Megan" shilled SEO services that were, per angry reviews left on the "Akira" trustpilot page, nonexistent. "My name is Megan, from The Akira Team — I just noticed your website through your Entireweb Website Listing, and wanted to get in touch with you right away," the spam message reads. "We have a special offer for your website today, and that is 1st Page Rankings in all major search engines (That's Google, Yahoo and Bing) + social media and video commercial advertising starting at just $29.99 which I am ABSOLUTELY certain will benefit your website and business, by bringing you LOTS of new customers, very very quickly." Upon discovering and analyzing these bots and their output, SentinelOne's researchers alerted OpenAI — and to the company's credit, it immediately investigated and ultimately disabled the creators' account. Still, it managed to run in earnest between September 2024 and February 2025, when AkiraBot got caught — and there's no way to know how long its creators, who weren't named, paid OpenAI for access to its API. More on AI scams: An AI Slop "Science" Site Has Been Beating Real Publications in Google Results by Publishing Fake Images of SpaceX Rockets
