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Sam Altman: The Future of OpenAI, ChatGPT’s Origins, and Building AI Hardware

A fireside with Sam Altman on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

Sam Altman grew up obsessed with technology, broke into the Stanford mainframe as a kid, and dropped out to start his first company before turning 20.

In this conversation, he traces the path from early startup struggles to building OpenAI—sharing what he’s learned about ambition, the weight of responsibility, and how to keep building when the whole world is watching. He opens up about the hardest moments of his career, the limits of personal productivity, and why, in the end, it’s all still about finding people you like working with and doing something that matters.

Chapters (Powered by https://ChapterMe.co)
00:00 – We’re going for AGI
01:25 – Founding OpenAI Against the Odds.
05:00 – GPT-4o & the Future of Reasoning Models.
07:00 – ChatGPT Memory & the ‘Her’ Vision.
10:00 – GPT-5 & the Vision of a Multimodal Supermodel.
11:00 – Robots at Scale.
15:00 – Don’t Build ChatGPT — Build What’s Missing.
17:00 – Elon’s Harsh Email & Building Conviction.
26:00 – One Person’s Leverage in the Next Decade.
32:00 – AI for Science: Sam’s Personal Bet.

New theory proposes time has three dimensions, with space as a secondary effect

Time, not space plus time, might be the single fundamental property in which all physical phenomena occur, according to a new theory by a University of Alaska Fairbanks scientist.

The theory also argues that time comes in three rather than just the single one we experience as continual forward progression. Space emerges as a secondary manifestation.

“These three time dimensions are the primary fabric of everything, like the canvas of a painting,” said associate research professor Gunther Kletetschka at the UAF Geophysical Institute. “Space still exists with its three dimensions, but it’s more like the paint on the canvas rather than the canvas itself.”

Strange Atlantic cold spot linked to century-long slowdown of major ocean current

For more than a century, a patch of cold water south of Greenland has resisted the Atlantic Ocean’s overall warming, fueling debate among scientists. A new study identifies the cause as the long-term weakening of a major ocean circulation system.

Researchers from the University of California, Riverside show that only one explanation fits both observed ocean temperatures and salinity patterns: the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, or AMOC, is slowing down. This massive current system helps regulate climate by moving warm, salty water northward and cooler water southward at depth.

“People have been asking why this cold spot exists,” said UCR climate scientist Wei Liu, who led the study with doctoral student Kai-Yuan Li. “We found the most likely answer is a weakening AMOC.”

Scientists Crack the 500-Million-Year-Old Code That Controls Your Immune System

A collaborative team from Penn Medicine and Penn Engineering has uncovered the mathematical principles behind a 500-million-year-old protein network that determines whether foreign materials are recognized as friend or foe. How does your body tell the difference between friendly visitors, like me

Is Mathematics Mostly Chaos or Mostly Order?

Last winter, at a meeting in the Finnish wilderness high above the Arctic Circle, a group of mathematicians gathered to contemplate the fate of a mathematical universe.

It was minus 20 degrees Celsius, and while some went cross-country skiing, Juan Aguilera, a set theorist at the Vienna University of Technology, preferred to linger in the cafeteria, tearing pieces of pulla pastry and debating the nature of two new notions of infinity. The consequences, Aguilera believed, were grand. “We just don’t know what they are yet,” he said.

Infinity, counterintuitively, comes in many shapes and sizes. This has been known since the 1870s, when the German mathematician Georg Cantor proved that the set of real numbers (all the numbers on the number line) is larger than the set of whole numbers, even though both sets are infinite. (The short version: No matter how you try to match real numbers to whole numbers, you’ll always end up with more real numbers.) The two sets, Cantor argued, represented entirely different flavors of infinity and therefore had profoundly different properties.