In a one-hour special set to air on ABC on Sept. 12, Oprah Winfrey plans to take on the sprawling topic of artificial intelligence. Her new program, AI and the Future of Us: An Oprah Winfrey Special, will include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and technology reviewer Marques Brownlee.

In a video promoting the show, Winfrey says, "AI: it may fascinate you or scare you, or if you're like me, it may do both."

In addition to people working in the AI industry or around it, the show also includes FBI Director Christopher Wray, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson and the co-founders of the Center for Humane Technology, who will presumably discuss the risks AI poses to creators and to humans in general.

A week before the show is scheduled to air, some critics are already taking the program to task for its guest list, which some are saying will tilt the content in favor of promoting AI instead of taking a hard look at its dangers. Among them are artist and activist Karla Ortiz, who posted a thread on X asking Winfrey to rethink the special's contents. 

In an X post, Los Angeles Times tech columnist and Blood in the Machine newsletter writer Brian Merchant called the special an "extended sales pitch for the generative AI industry at the moment when its fortunes are flagging and the AI bubble is threatening to burst."

Winfrey also faced criticism back in March when her last special, focused on the weight-loss drug Ozempic, aired on ABC. 

In a case of AI imitating life, a video purporting to show Winfrey interviewing Sam Altman for the special actually shows an animated version of Winfrey interviewing herself before cutting to a cartoon figure who looks more (but not very much) like Sam Altman.

The AI special is scheduled to air at 8 p.m. ET on Thursday, Sept. 12, and be made available the next day on Hulu.

Musician, producer and entrepreneur Will.i.am doesn't think AI is a threat to humanity -- unless it's run like businesses in the social media industry, which he says haven't prioritized the public good.

He's not worried about AI coming for his job either, as he believes creatives will always prevail.

"[AI] isn't going to outrap me or Lil Wayne. And, even if it does, it doesn't know my pain that I'm rapping about … it's not going to tell exactly my heartbreak," he said in an interview with CNET on Thursday. "AI is not going to perform. AI is not going to sweat. It's not going to give you a monologue. It's not going to do any of that."

He does think AI has the power to revolutionize radio, a media format still used by 86% of Americans aged 12 and older, according to the Pew Research Center.

I was talking with Will.i.am about a new venture he has in AI-powered radio called Raidio.fyi. He believes the format -- with interactive AI personas -- can change the way we consume audio content, much like generative AI chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Anthropic's Claude have already affected content creation and search. 

Interacting with AI, meanwhile, is moving into a new and more advanced phases, as we're now seeing with features like Gemini Live and ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode.

This is far from the first entrepreneurial venture for Will.i.am, who rose to prominence with the Black Eyed Peas. He has dabbled in wearables with products such as the Puls smartband and the i.am Plus Dial smartwatch. He has also launched products like a triangular backpack with speakers and a Foto.sosho iPhone case and is the founder of AI-focused tech company i.am Plus.

How Raidio.fyi works

Raidio.fyi is an AI-powered interactive media platform that allows you to chat with radio stations to ask about music or the stories behind songs and dive further into topics like news, sports and culture. The music station plays rap, hip hop and pop from artists like GloRilla and Sabrina Carpenter, but you can also make requests..

It's part of FYI.AI, a messaging platform for the creative community, which was founded in 2022. Will.i.am is the CEO.

After you download the FYI.AI app and sign up for an account, you can access nine radio stations under the AI tab. You can choose from one of four AI personas as the voice. The default voice is a British female named Fyiona. All of the persona names start with FYI, presumably as a nod to the parent app: Fyiera, Fyin and Fyilip are the other options.

Even though I signed up as Lisa, Fyiona kept calling me ~Lisa, which she pronounced, "Tilde Lisa."

I was curious about technology news and how Raidio.fyi's presentation of it compared to sources like The New York Times and The Washington Post, which highlighted tech companies Apple and Nvidia potentially investing in AI startup OpenAI, the arrest of Telegram's founder in France and Yelp suing Google.

Raidio.fyi's science and technology station covered the NASA and SpaceX Crew-9 mission coming up in September and research into long COVID at London's King's College. Fyiona was happy to skip over stories I wasn't interested in. When I asked about AI news specifically, she talked about the agreements OpenAI and Anthropic have signed with the US government for safety testing, but the images that cycled through included a photo of Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg for some reason.

Will.i.am said human journalists curate the news daily.

"Journalists are doing journalism stuff and it's these projects that are acting like a hyper prompt," he said. "And that hyper prompt with credible stories, images … [enable] Raidio.FYI [to present the content] in the form of radio."

From AI co-host to AI personas

In January, Will.i.am debuted a new show on broadcast network SiriusFM with an AI co-host. This helped sow the seeds for Raidio.fyi, which would theoretically allow anyone to "call in" to the AI persona to talk about anything, sort of like a radio host opening up the lines for callers.

The interactive component is what distinguishes Raidio.fyi from other audio platforms like streaming. It's also able to pull in current events and, in a demo video, offer advice about where to buy Fenty Beauty products in Boston. In a segment on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Monday, Raidio.fyi even predicted who will win the 2024 presidential election.

"Our target audience is folks that love information and listen to music," Will.i.am said. "It's the same target audience as folks that listen to Hot 97, Power 106, Kiss FM."

He's bullish on radio's future and believes listeners want a deeper relationship with the content. His dream is for radio as a whole to evolve into this interactive format.

AI in your car

Will.i.am also aspires to "have our system in every single car that hits the road off the assembly line."

That's not necessarily a pipe dream. Auto manufacturer Mercedes is an FYI.AI investor. At CES in January, the two companies previewed a feature called Sound Drive, which delivers an interactive in-car music experience. According to a press release, software allows music to react to the way the car is being driven.

"Utilizing a suite of sensors and advanced software, [Sound Drive] interprets various driving dynamics -- such as recuperation, acceleration, steering and braking -- and converts them into musical expressions, allowing the driver to 'compose' in real-time," the release said.

Will.i.am said Sound Drive will be released "after September." In the coming months, he hopes FYI.AI will strike deals with other car brands.

As for the potential for existential risks from artificial intelligence, which worries even some prominent figures in the AI community, Will.i.am isn't having it.

"AI killing us off someday for headlines or whatever -- that is to get people's attention," he said. "I don't think that's the case. I just think that's a very loose, irresponsible way to go about a new technology."

In less than two years, the generative AI chatbot ChatGPT has become a household name alongside products like the iPhone, Windows and Google Search.

OpenAI is the company behind the chatbot, which hit the market in November 2022, spurring a wave of AI-powered creativity that quickly mesmerized us, in text, images and videos. Other companies — tech titans and fellow startups — saw the effusive public reaction and jumped on the bandwagon with their own tools.

Meta's Llama model debuted in February 2023. Google's Gemini chatbot, initially called Bard, came out in May 2023. Anthropic's Claude and Adobe's Firefly followed shortly thereafter. Llama distinguishes itself as an open-source model, which Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said will ultimately make it more competitive, while Firefly is focused on image generation and editing. Otherwise these tools more or less have the same goals: to help us brainstorm, write, learn and plan with reasoning, vision analysis, code generation and multilingual processing capabilities. 

Though the initial novelty of AI-generated content may have worn off a bit, tech companies continue to push boundaries with increasingly powerful models, new ways to interact with chatbots, and additional functionality such as search. As of January, SEO strategy site Backlinko found that ChatGPT had nearly 70% market share among subscription-based AI tools. And as the original gen AI pioneer, OpenAI may hold further advantage in this burgeoning market as the first to capture our imaginations and show us what chatbots can really do at home and at work.

If you're trying to get a handle on OpenAI, keep scrolling for a look at everything you need to know.

What is OpenAI?

OpenAI is the AI power player founded in 2015 that launched a new era of AI accessibility and creativity. Despite its prominence, it's still considered a startup.

Its mission at the start wasn't to put AI tools in the hands of consumers. Instead, it was to "ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." Artificial general intelligence, or AGI, is a more advanced form of AI that rivals human intelligence and can outperform us at many tasks. It remains an open question how close we are to actually achieving AGI.

OpenAI began as a nonprofit, but in 2019 it split into what it calls a hybrid for-profit and nonprofit organization, to raise more capital in order to acquire the necessary computing resources to develop AGI. The company is based in San Francisco and its CEO is Sam Altman.

OpenAI is the for-profit arm. It's released, in its "GPT" family, large language models, or LLMs, which are AI systems trained on huge data sets to understand and generate human language. It's also released multimodal models in the GPT family. Those are deep-learning models that process additional content types, like video, audio and images.

GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini are the latest GPT models. These AI models facilitate our interactions with OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot.

OpenAI has also developed text-to-image models in the Dall-E family and has developed a text-to-video model called Sora that is expected to be released later this year.

How does ChatGPT work?

OpenAI is the company that developed the online chatbot ChatGPT, which was first released in November 2022. The gen AI technology underpinning ChatGPT allows the bot to generate responses to user prompts on its own.

Prompts can include text or verbal requestsin plain English for nearly anything, as long as the query falls within OpenAI's safety standards. You can request help planning a Labor Day barbecue, for instance, or ask the bot to tell you about the significance of the Louisiana Purchase or explain what causes the aurora borealis. The prolific chatbot can also write poetry and code, and it has passed the CPA exam and the bar exam (though some people are skeptical about its bar results).

How does OpenAI train its models?

ChatGPT was originally based solely on a large language model. That's the AI system trained on large data sets to understand and generate human language. The latest GPT model, GPT-4o, is a multimodal model, which means it understands images, audio and video as well.

OpenAI says its LLMs use information that's publicly available on the internet; info the company licenses from third parties; and data from OpenAI's users and human trainers. However, the models have cut-off dates, which means their training data is current only up to a certain date. In the case of GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini, that date is October 2023. 

Further, OpenAI says it filters out data it doesn't want its models to learn, like hate speech, adult content and spam. The information fed into the LLM is called training data, and OpenAI, like other AI makers, hasn't shared exactly what information is in its training data.    

What was OpenAI's first GPT model and when did it come out?

OpenAI introduced the concept of generative pretrained transformers, or GPTs, in a 2018 research paper. The name refers to the model's ability to generate text, as well as its use of an AI technology called a transformer, which is a type of deep learning that can translate text and speech nearly in real time. (Deep learning is a branch of machine learning that uses neural networks — models that make decisions like the human brain.)

The first transformer-based language model was 2018's OpenAI-GPT, or GPT-1. That was followed by GPT-2 and GPT-3, in 2019 and 2020, respectively.

These models were long available to developers, but it was the release of GPT-3.5 and the ChatGPT interface in 2022 that made it possible for virtually anyone to use generative AI, sparking the transformative era we're in now.

CNET reviewer Imad Khan noted earlier this year that ChatGPT 3.5 will "get the job done for most people," providing "serviceable" answers even though "it's always best to do a bit of fact-checking."   

He found that ChatGPT 4 is smarter and generates more-thoughtful answers that can synthesize complex information. "ChatGPT 4 really impresses when you need more-specialized answers to specific questions (like college-level philosophy questions)," Khan wrote.

What is the most recent GPT model?

The latest GPT models are GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini.

GPT-4o provides responses that are more up to date than those of its predecessors, and it can understand — and generate — larger chunks of text. (The "o" stands for "omni" as it can accept any combination of text, audio, image and video inputs and generate any combination of text, audio and image outputs.)

GPT-4o Mini is a small language model that provides AI horsepower and speed without the high cost or computing resources required for an LLM. (Microsoft's Phi-3 Mini, which is built to run on phones and PCs, is another example. So is Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash.)

It has a context window of 128,000 tokens, which is a measurement of how much it can remember in a single conversation. GPT-4o has the same context window, while a prior model, GPT-3.5 Turbo, has a context window of 16,000 tokens.

What does OpenAI do besides language models and chatbots?

OpenAI has a family of text-to-image models called Dall-E. The latest, Dall-E 3, was released in October 2023.

In his review, CNET's Stephen Shankland called Dall-E 3 "a marvel" among image generators that does well with both realistic and surreal images and encourages you to get creative.

OpenAI's text-to-video model, Sora, offers the same premise for realistic videos, but it's still being tested for potential harms and risks — like creating misleading content, as well as extreme violence, sexual content, hateful imagery, celebrity likenesses and the intellectual property of others — so it isn't yet available to the public.

OpenAI also offers APIs for developers who want to build new applications based on OpenAI technology or custom AI apps called GPTs, which you can create and share in OpenAI's app store. There are millions of GPTs available, including ones for fitness, haikus and books.

What is SearchGPT?

OpenAI is testing a search engine prototype, called SearchGPT. It's currently available to only a small group of testers.

Instead of you having to ask questions and comb through links to find an answer, as in traditional search, SearchGPT generates answers to questions, with links to the online sources where it found the information. It's a comparable experience to Google's AI Overviews or the search functionality from startups like Perplexity.ai.

OpenAI eventually plans to integrate search functionality into ChatGPT.

Who is on OpenAI's leadership team?

OpenAI was founded by a group of research engineers and scientists, as well as CEO Altman, entrepreneur Elon Musk, machine learning expert Ilya Sutskever and president and chairman Greg Brockman. Mira Murati later joined as CTO and Sarah Friar has come on board as CFO.

Sutskever, who was the chief scientist at OpenAI until June, disagreed with Altman over how rapidly AI should develop amid concerns it could eventually harm humanity without the right constraints. The same month he left OpenAI, Sutskever founded an AI company called Safe Superintelligence Inc., or SSI. According to the website, its singular goal is safe superintelligence, or AGI.

In November 2023, Altman was briefly ousted as CEO by the board of directors for, according to one director, withholding and misrepresenting information and lying. He was reinstated five days later, following what was reportedly a weekend of internal conflict and pressure from investors. OpenAI has said Altman didn't do anything that justified his removal as CEO.

What happened between OpenAI and Elon Musk?

When OpenAI was thinking about switching to a for-profit model in 2017, Musk, according to an OpenAI blog post, wanted the startup to merge with his electric-car company, Tesla, or to give him majority equity, board control and the CEO title. Asked by CNN for a response to the blog post at the time, lawyers for Musk declined to comment. Musk departed in February 2018 with the intent to build his own AGI competitor, OpenAI's post said.

Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, accusing the startup of abandoning its nonprofit mission, but he later dropped it, and then he refiled it, earlier this month, alleging fraud and breach of contract. In response, OpenAI referred to its blog post about Musk's initial lawsuit. The post said the company intends to move to dismiss all of Musk's claims.

Who has invested in OpenAI?

Founders Altman, Brockman and Musk, along with VCs Reid Hoffman and Peter Thiel, investor Jessica Livingston, Amazon's cloud computing arm Amazon Web Services, IT company Infosys and nonprofit YC Research (now OpenResearch) committed an initial $1 billion.

Since then, Microsoft has invested $13 billion, according to reports. While details of investment are confidential, a Microsoft spokesperson said, "it is important to note that Microsoft does not own any portion of OpenAI and is simply entitled to a share of profit distributions." Other backers include investment firm Tiger Global and VC firms Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and K2 Global.

Microsoft's first investment, in 2019, helped fund supercomputing technology. Later investments have supported OpenAI research. In addition, Microsoft's Copilot AI assistant uses GPT-4o to answer queries and generate content with greater accuracy, as well as to open apps and edit photos.

What is OpenAI's relationship with Apple?

At its annual developers conference in June, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI. The iPhone maker plans to integrate ChatGPT into its iOS smartphone operating system; its tablet operating system, iPadOS; and its computer operating system, MacOS. It also plans to offer ChatGPT as an option to users querying its Siri voice assistant.

What's going on with OpenAI and publishers?

The New York Times is among the publications that have sued OpenAI (and Microsoft) over unauthorized use of their content to train AI models.

The New York Daily News, The Chicago Tribune, The Orlando Sentinel, The Sun Sentinel of Florida, The San Jose Mercury News, The Denver Post, The Orange County Register and The St. Paul Pioneer Press have also sued OpenAI over the use of their content to train chatbots.

OpenAI has sought to have parts of the lawsuits dismissed, saying that chatbots aren't replacements for news articles. The AI startup has also begun to sign deals with a number of media companies to license news stories, including the Associated Press, Axel Springer, News Corp and Vox Media.

Correction, Sept. 6: This article earlier misstated aspects of Microsoft's investment in OpenAI. Microsoft does not own any portion of OpenAI.