The shoe is most certainly on the other foot. On Monday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red” at the company to improve ChatGPT, delaying advertising plans and other products in the process, The Information reported based on a leaked internal memo. The move follows Google’s release of its Gemini 3 model last month, which has outperformed ChatGPT on some industry benchmark tests and sparked high-profile praise on social media.
In the memo, Altman wrote, “We are at a critical time for ChatGPT.” The company will push back work on advertising integration, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant feature called Pulse. Altman encouraged temporary team transfers and established daily calls for employees responsible for enhancing the chatbot.
The directive creates an odd symmetry with events from December 2022, when Google management declared its own “code red” internal emergency after ChatGPT launched and rapidly gained in popularity. At the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai reassigned teams across the company to develop AI prototypes and products to compete with OpenAI’s chatbot. Now, three years later, the AI industry is in a very different place.
Read AI’s apps, including its new Android app, now include the ability to record impromptu in-person meetings. (Read AI Images)
Read AI, which made its mark analyzing online meetings and messages, is expanding its focus beyond the video call and the email inbox to the physical world, in a sign of the growing industry trend of applying artificial intelligence to offline and spontaneous work data.
The Seattle-based startup on Wednesday introduced a new system called Operator that captures and analyzes interactions throughout the workday, including impromptu hallway conversations and in-person meetings in addition to virtual calls and emails, working across a wide range of popular apps and platforms.
With the launch, Read AI is releasing new desktop clients for Windows and macOS, and a new Android app to join its existing iOS app and browser-based features.
For offline conversations — like a coffee chat or a conference room huddle — users can open the Read AI app and manually hit record. The system then transcribes that audio and incorporates it into the company’s AI system for broader insights into each user’s meetings and workday.
It comes as more companies bring workers back to the office for at least part of the week. According to new Read AI research, 53% of meetings now happen in-person or without a calendar invite — up from 47% in 2023 — while a large number of workday interactions occur outside of meetings entirely.
Read AI is seeing an expansion of in-person and impromptu work meetings across its user base. (Read AI Graphic; Click for larger image)
In a break from others in the industry, Operator works via smartphone in these situations and does not require a pendant or clip-on recording device.
“I don’t think we’d ever build a device, because I think the phones themselves are good enough,” said Read AI CEO David Shim in a recent interview, as featured on this week’s GeekWire Podcast.
This differs from hardware-first competitors like Limitless and Plaud, which require users to purchase and wear dedicated devices to capture “real-world” audio throughout the day.
While these companies argue that a wearable provides a frictionless, “always-on” experience without draining your phone’s battery, Read AI is betting that the friction of charging and wearing a separate gadget is a bigger hurdle than simply using the device you already have.
To address the privacy concerns of recording in-person chats, Read AI relies on user compliance rather than an automated audible warning. When a user hits record on the desktop or mobile app, a pop-up prompts them to declare that the conversation is being captured, via voice or text. On mobile, a persistent reminder remains visible on the screen for the duration of the recording.
Founded in 2021 by David Shim, Robert Williams, and Elliott Waldron, Read AI has raised more than $80 million and landed major enterprise customers for its cross-platform AI meeting assistant and productivity tools. It now reports 5 million monthly active users, with 24 million connected calendars to date.
Operator is included in all of Read AI’s existing plans at no additional cost.
Em dashes have become what many believe to be a telltale sign of AI-generated text over the past few years. The punctuation mark appears frequently in outputs from ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, sometimes to the point where readers believe they can identify AI writing by its overuse alone—although people can overuse it, too.
On Thursday evening, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted on X that ChatGPT has started following custom instructions to avoid using em dashes. “Small-but-happy win: If you tell ChatGPT not to use em-dashes in your custom instructions, it finally does what it’s supposed to do!” he wrote.
The post, which came two days after the release of OpenAI’s new GPT-5.1 AI model, received mixed reactions from users who have struggled for years with getting the chatbot to follow specific formatting preferences. And this “small win” raises a very big question: If the world’s most valuable AI company has struggled with controlling something as simple as punctuation use after years of trying, perhaps what people call artificial general intelligence (AGI) is farther off than some in the industry claim.
On Wednesday, OpenAI released GPT-5.1 Instant and GPT-5.1 Thinking, two updated versions of its flagship AI models now available in ChatGPT. The company is wrapping the models in the language of anthropomorphism, claiming that they’re warmer, more conversational, and better at following instructions.
The release follows complaints earlier this year that its previous models were excessively cheerful and sycophantic, along with an opposing controversy among users over how OpenAI modified the default GPT-5 output style after several suicide lawsuits.
The company now faces intense scrutiny from lawyers and regulators that could threaten its future operations. In that kind of environment, it’s difficult to just release a new AI model, throw out a few stats, and move on like the company could even a year ago. But here are the basics: The new GPT-5.1 Instant model will serve as ChatGPT’s faster default option for most tasks, while GPT-5.1 Thinking is a simulated reasoning model that attempts to handle more complex problem-solving tasks.
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