The Download: OpenAI’s future research, and US climate regulation is under threat

—Will Douglas Heaven

For the past couple of years, OpenAI has felt like a one-man brand. With his showbiz style and fundraising glitz, CEO Sam Altman overshadows all other big names on the firm’s roster.

But Altman is not the one building the technology on which its reputation rests. That responsibility falls to OpenAI’s twin heads of research—chief research officer Mark Chen and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. Between them, they share the role of making sure OpenAI stays one step ahead of powerhouse rivals like Google.

I recently sat down with Chen and Pachocki for an exclusive conversation which covered everything from how they manage the inherent tension between research and product, to what they really mean when they talk about AGI, to what happened to OpenAI’s superalignment team. 

I also wanted to get a sense of where their heads are at in the run-up to OpenAI’s biggest product release in months: GPT-5. Read the full story.

An EPA rule change threatens to gut US climate regulations

The mechanism that allows the US federal government to regulate climate change is on the chopping block.

On Tuesday, US Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lee Zeldin announced that the agency is taking aim at the endangerment finding, a 2009 rule that’s essentially the tentpole supporting federal greenhouse-gas regulations.

This might sound like an obscure legal situation, but it’s a really big deal for climate policy in the US. So let’s look at what this rule says now, what the proposed change looks like, and what it all means. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart