OpenAI's Vice President of Product Policy, Ryan Beiermeister, was fired in January following a sex discrimination claim, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The termination came after Beiermeister reportedly voiced criticism of a planned "adult mode" for the ChatGPT chatbot, which would introduce erotica into the user experience, as reported by TechCrunch. Meanwhile, xAI co-founder Tony Wu announced his resignation late Monday night, marking the latest departure of a senior executive from Elon Musk's AI company.
Beiermeister's firing was prompted by an accusation from a male colleague, the Wall Street Journal reported. Beiermeister told the Journal that the allegation of discrimination was "absolutely false." TechCrunch reached out to OpenAI for comment but had not received a response at the time of publication. Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, oversees the company's consumer-facing products, according to TechCrunch.
In other news, Wikipedia editors are considering blacklisting Archive.today after the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger, Ars Technica reported. The attack stemmed from a 2023 post about the anonymous maintainer of the website. Wikipedia editors are considering three options: removing or hiding all Archive.today links and adding the site to the spam blacklist, deprecating Archive.today while keeping existing links, or maintaining the status quo.
At xAI, Wu expressed warm feelings for his time at the company but stated it was time for his "next chapter," according to a social media post cited by Ars Technica. Wu wrote that "a small team armed with AIs can move mountains and redefine whats possible." xAI reportedly had 1,200 employees as of March 2025, including AI engineers and those focused on the X social network, Ars Technica noted.
In technology updates, OpenAI is updating ChatGPT's deep research tool with a full-screen viewer, allowing users to scroll through and navigate specific areas of its AI-generated reports, The Verge reported. The built-in viewer also allows users to open a new table of contents to jump to specific sections of the report.
Finally, The Verge also reported on the Washington Post, noting that Jeff Bezos could have saved the newspaper's local news and sports reporters but instead laid them off.
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