• OpenAI boosts ChatGPT's voice mode on mobile as the competition over personal agents heats up.
• The new release connects OpenAI's voice model to its agentic text models, which can handle tasks.
• OpenAI has yet to release a direct competitor to viral AI assistants like Instinct and Meta's Muse.

OpenAI is pushing further into the hotly contested market for personal agents — this time with voice.

The company is adding its most advanced voice system to ChatGPT's website and mobile app on Wednesday. OpenAI's release allows users to speak to delegate single and recurring tasks that require multiple steps, a browser, and disparate apps. The company has been rolling out launches ahead of its big OpenAI DevDay event next week.

OpenAI's product lead for ChatGPT voice, Atty Eleti, gave a demo to Business Insider. Only speaking with the app, he had the tool analyze his DoorDash spending, pay $5 to book a pickleball court, and reorganize his calendar.

"In the future, we really imagine people using voice as the primary modality to interact with AI," Eleti said, "and that's kind of our North Star that we're working towards."

Personal AI assistants like Instinct and Meta's Muse are having a moment in Silicon Valley as the industry peddles apps tailored to handle cumbersome internet tasks. OpenAI has many of these capabilities in ChatGPT, though it hasn't yet released a narrower offshoot. This voice tool is a play for the AI-assistant buzz.

In the short term, the improvements make it easier for people to delegate work to ChatGPT by speaking while they're on the go. In the long run, they'll serve OpenAI's hardware ambitions: Bloomberg has reported that the company is building a smart speaker for release in 2027.

Wednesday's release connects OpenAI's voice model, GPT-Live, to AI models that can perform tasks on computers or in browsers, a focus the company maintained before the personal AI agent craze. GPT-Live, which can listen and respond simultaneously, was already turned on for ChatGPT's basic conversational mode and connected to agentic models on the desktop app.

Voice mode, as Eleti sees it, has three main benefits. Speaking is quick and natural — "you can blurt out your thoughts," he said. You can do it with your hands off a device. And it can help you with vocal tasks, like learning a language or practicing a speech. Eleti and his colleagues use it while commuting and on walks, he said.

Eleti said more than 150 million people already use ChatGPT's dictation and voice mode tools. Still, the team faces an uphill battle. Though smart speakers have shown some staying power, offices are still organized around desktop computers.

Plus, though it's quicker to speak than type, it's also quicker to read than to listen. Eleti said his team considered this dynamic when deciding how ChatGPT would respond to audio prompts.

"We don't think of this as just pure voice in and voice out," Eteli said. "It's about voice in and then the right output back. Sometimes it's text, sometimes it's voice, sometimes it's a mix."

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• OpenAI's new safety hire, Paul Christiano, shared a dire warning about risks posed by AI.
• Christiano said that if humans lose control of AI "most people could die."
• He also said global coordination would be needed to address the risk.

OpenAI's new safety hire didn't mince words about what's at stake in the age of AI superintelligence.

"If we build superintelligence without more robust alignment I expect we will permanently lose control of it. If that happens then most people could die," Paul Christiano, an AI safety researcher, said on Wednesday after OpenAI announced he was joining its board and Safety and Security Committee.

In a lengthy statement about his new role, Christiano addressed the threat AI poses and warned that humans are at imminent risk of losing control of AI systems.

"Based on the recent trajectory of capabilities and the continued difficulty of alignment, I now believe there is a meaningful risk that rapid acceleration in AI capabilities leads to catastrophic and irreversible loss of control in the very near term," Christiano wrote. "I do not think that the AI industry in general, including OpenAI, is currently on track to reduce this risk to an acceptable level."

Christiano previously led alignment research at OpenAI and worked for the federal government as the head of safety at the Center for AI Standards and Innovation within the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

On Wednesday, he said his joining of OpenAI was "not an endorsement or criticism of OpenAI's safety practices in particular" but that he hopes all frontier labs improve their safety oversight. He also said reducing the risks posed by AI would require coordination worldwide.

AI researchers have consistently warned about the risks posed by superintelligence and the singularity, a term used to refer to the point at which AI systems surpass human intelligence, improve themselves, and advance at a rate that humans can no longer predict or control. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in July that the singularity had already arrived.

The risk of losing control of AI

Christiano said he thinks the risk of losing control of AI is so great right now due to AI's increasing abilities in AI research, which he said could lead to a "rapid intelligence explosion." He also said the way AI is trained with reinforcement learning means the models are being taught to "get as much reward as they can."

"It has long seemed theoretically possible that this could motivate AI agents to undermine human control, seek power and resources, and cover up their tracks in pursuit of misaligned goals correlated with reward," he said. "Public evidence from recent incidents suggests that this is not just a theoretical possibility."

Christiano said that frontier companies still have the opportunity to address the situation, including by improving coordination, slowing development as needed, adopting share safety standards, and transparently sharing information about risks and mitigation efforts.

His statement came less than a day after another AI researcher shared a dire warning about AI. Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who previously worked at OpenAI, said Tuesday night that he had resigned from his role and that neither company was acting responsibly.

"They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives," he said on X.

OpenAI has also lost several safety researchers over the years, with some casting doubt on the company's commitment to developing AI safely.