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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Microsoft Build conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on May 21, 2024. 

Jason Redmond | AFP | Getty Images

OpenAI on Tuesday said it created a Safety and Security Committee led by senior executives, after disbanding its previous oversight board in mid-May.

The new committee will be responsible for making recommendations to OpenAI’s board “on critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations,” the company said.

It comes as the developer of the ChatGPT virtual assistant announced it has begun training its “next frontier model.”

The firm said in a blog post that it anticipates the “resulting systems to bring us to the next level of capabilities on our path to AGI,” or artificial general intelligence — which relates to AI that is as smart or smarter than humans. 

The formation of a new oversight team comes after OpenAI dissolved a previous team that was focused on the long-term risks of AI. Prior to that, both team leaders, OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike, announced their departures from the Microsoft-backed startup.

AI safety has been at the forefront of a larger debate, as the huge models that underpin applications like ChatGPT get more advanced. AI product developers are also wondering when AGI will arrive and what risks will come with it.

Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Nicole Seligman, who are all on OpenAI’s board of directors, now sit on the new safety committee alongside Altman.

Leike this month wrote that OpenAI’s “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.” In response to his departure, Altman said on social media platform X that he was sad to see Leike leave, adding that OpenAI has “a lot more to do”

Over the next 90 days, the safety group will evaluate OpenAI’s processes and safeguards and share their recommendations with the company’s board. OpenAI will provide an update on the recommendations that it has adopted at a later date.

– CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this report.

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Oracle’s stock closes out best week since 2001 on cloud momentum

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Oracle's stock closes out best week since 2001 on cloud momentum

Oracle CEO Safra Catz speaks at the FII PRIORITY Summit in Miami Beach, Florida, on Feb. 20, 2025.

Joe Raedle | Getty Images

Oracle shares enjoyed their best week since 2001 as Wall Street cheered a strong earnings report and bullish comments on the company’s prospects in cloud computing.

The stock jumped about 24% for the week, with almost all the gains coming in the two trading days after the company’s quarterly earnings release. The last time Oracle had a better week was in April 2001, in the midst of the dot-com crash, when so-called dead-cat bounces were common. The prior quarter Oracle shares lost almost half their value.

It’s a much different company today, and while Oracle was generally viewed as a late entrant into the cloud infrastructure market, the company has found a niche and is seeing rapid growth helping clients operate artificial intelligence models.

“Oracle is in the enviable position of having more demand than it can fulfill,” Joseph Bonner, an analyst at Argus Research, wrote in a note to clients on Friday. He recommends buying the shares and lifted his price target to $235 from $200.

Oracle rose to a record on Friday, closing at $215.22.

In the company’s earnings report late Wednesday, revenue and earnings topped estimates. CEO Safra Catz said sales for the new fiscal year should come in above $67 billion, higher than LSEG’s $65.18 billion consensus.

“The demand is astronomical,” Larry Ellison, Oracle’s chairman told analysts on the earnings call. “But we have to do this methodically. The reason demand continues to outstrip supply is we can only build these data centers, build these computers, so fast.”

Oracle has been playing catchup in cloud to rivals Amazon, Google and Microsoft.

In the 2025 fiscal year, Oracle’s capital expenditures exceeded $21 billion, which is more than the company spent from 2019 to 2024. The sum should reach $25 billion in fiscal 2026, Catz said on the call.

Google anticipates $75 billion in capital spending this year. Microsoft’s target for the fiscal year is $80 billion.

Oracle’s client list now includes Meta, OpenAI and Elon Musk’s xAI. They’re among the companies that require the most Nvidia graphics processing units to train generative AI models that create text, images and videos in response to a few words of human input.

Startups Baseten, Physical Intelligence and Vast Data are also cloud clients, Oracle announced this week.

“We will build and operate more cloud infrastructure data centers than all of our cloud infrastructure competitors combined,” Ellison said.

Oracle shares are up 29% so far in 2025, while the Nasdaq is up less than 1%. Among the most highly valued U.S. tech companies, the next best performer for the year is Meta, which is up around 17%.

WATCH: Oracle shares pop on strong demand, Q4 earnings beat

Oracle shares pop on strong demand, Q4 earnings beat

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Here’s how to turn off public posting on the Meta AI app

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Here's how to turn off public posting on the Meta AI app

This photo illustration created Jan. 7, 2025, shows an image of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, and an image of the Meta logo.

Drew Angerer | Afp | Getty Images

AI generated images of women kissing while mud wrestling and President Donald Trump eating poop are some of the conversations users are unknowingly sharing publicly through Meta’s newly launched AI app.  

The company rolled out the Meta AI app in April, putting it in direct competition with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. But the tool has recently garnered some negative publicity and sparked privacy concerns over some of the wacky — and personal — prompts being shared publicly from user accounts.

Besides the mud wrestlers and Trump eating poop, some of the examples CNBC found include a user prompting Meta’s AI tool to generate photos of the character Hello Kitty “tying a rope in a loop hanging from a barn rafter, standing on a stool.” Another user whose prompt was posted publicly asked Meta AI to send what appears to be a veterinarian bill to another person.

“sir, your home address is listed on there,” a user commented on the photo of the veterinarian bill.

Prompts put into the Meta AI tool appear to show up publicly on the app by default, but users can adjust settings on the app to protect their privacy.

Here’s how to do it:

To start, click on your profile photo on the top right corner of the screen and scroll down to data and privacy. Then head to the “suggesting your prompts on other apps” tab. This should include Facebook and Instagram. Once there, click the toggle feature for the apps that you want to keep your prompts from being shared on.

After, go back to the main data and privacy page and click “manage your information.” Select “make all your public prompts visible only to you” and click the “apply to all” function. You can also delete your prompt history there.

Meta has beefed up its recent bets on AI to improve its offerings to compete against megacap peers and leading AI contenders, such as Google and OpenAI. This week the company invested $14 billion in startup Scale AI and tapped its CEO Alexandr Wang to help lead the company’s AI strategy.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

WATCH: Meta’s one of AI’s leaders not a laggard, says Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman

Meta's one of AI's leaders not a laggard, says Futurum Group CEO Daniel Newman

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Amazon reorganizes health-care business in latest bid to crack multitrillion-dollar market

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Amazon reorganizes health-care business in latest bid to crack multitrillion-dollar market

A One Medical clinic location is pictured in Emeryville, California on February 16, 2024.

Loren Elliott | The Washington Post | Getty Images

For the better part of a decade, Amazon has been trying to carve it’s way into the U.S. health-care market, through billions of dollars worth of acquisitions, big-name hires and high-profile partnerships. It’s been a slog at times, and the company’s long-term strategy hasn’t always been clear.

Following a series of executive departures, Amazon is now restructuring its health business, telling CNBC that Amazon Health Services will be divided into six new units, with a goal of creating a simpler structure.

As part of the effort, the company has tapped a number of longtime Amazon leaders and elevated some One Medical executives to oversee the divisions. Neil Lindsay, senior vice president of Amazon Health Services told CNBC in an interview that the company has been working on the overhaul for the past several months.

“Our leadership team has been focused on simplifying our structure to move faster and continue to innovate effectively,” Lindsay said in a video chat. “One of the problems we’re trying to solve is the fragmented experience for patients and customers that’s common in healthcare.”

Amazon said it hasn’t conducted broad layoffs as part of the changes.

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The reorganization comes after Amazon lost several senior health leaders in recent months. Dr. Vin Gupta, who joined in 2020 and served as chief medical officer of Amazon Pharmacy, left in February, followed by Trent Green, whose last day as CEO of Amazon’s primary care chain One Medical was in April.

Aaron Martin, vice president of health care at Amazon, announced internally last month that he plans to leave his role. Dr. Sunita Mishra, Amazon’s chief medical officer, also departed in May. 

Mishra and Martin’s departures have not been previously reported, and neither responded to requests for comment. Amazon doesn’t plan on naming a new CEO of One Medical following Green’s departure.

Martin, who lives in Nashville, Tennessee, said in a memo to staffers that he’ll remain at Amazon “for a while” to help with the transition.

“I then plan to take some time off this summer and hang out with my wife and my kids, finally get a cover band going in Nashville, and then possibly do something new,” Martin wrote in the memo, which was shared with CNBC.

Ambitious efforts

Amazon has for years been on a mission to crack the multitrillion-dollar U.S. health-care industry, which is notoriously complex and inefficient.

While it had long served providers and others in health care with its cloud-based technology, Amazon’s first big splash directly into the market came in 2018 with the the acquisition of online pharmacy PillPack for about $750 million. Two years later, it launched its own offering called Amazon Pharmacy.

The company then bought One Medical for $3.9 billion in 2023, among its largest acquisitions ever, giving Amazon access to a chain of brick-and-mortar primary care clinics and a robust membership base.

There have been some major setbacks. The company shuttered its telehealth service, Amazon Care, in 2022. That came a year after it disbanded Haven, the joint health-care venture between Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase. The announcement of Haven in 2018 sent shockwaves through the medical world, pushing down shares of health-care companies on fears about how the combined muscle of leaders in technology and finance could wring costs out of the system.

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In the areas where Amazon continues to operate, competition is fierce and, in the case of primary care, margins are very slim.

PillPack founders TJ Parker and Elliot Cohen, who left Amazon in 2022, recently launched a new health-care marketplace called General Medicine that will compete with Amazon. Mishra confirmed to STAT News that she advised the nascent startup. Amazon declined to comment on whether Mishra’s involvement with General Medicine was related to her departure. 

Lindsay characterized the recent departures as part of the natural evolution of Amazon’s health business. He added that there’s “no shortage of depth of talent” within his organization.

“We’re a fast-evolving organization because the opportunity is so big,” Lindsay said.

Under its new structure, Amazon Health Services will be focused around the six groups, or what the company calls “pillars.” 

  • One Medical Clinical Care Delivery, led by Dr. Andrew Diamond
  • One Medical Clinical Operations and Performance, led by Suzanne Hansen
  • AHS Strategic Growth and Network Development, led by John Singerling
  • AHS Store, Tech and Marketing, led by Prakash Bulusu
  • AHS Compliance, led by Kim Otte
  • AHS Pharmacy Services, led by John Love

Amazon declined to share financial figures for its health business, but Lindsay said it is seeing “very strong growth” across the offerings.

One Medical went public in 2020, and it was still losing money when it was bought by Amazon. At the end of 2022 in its last quarter as a standalone entity, it reported a net loss of $101.1 million on revenue of $272.4 million.

Since joining Amazon, One Medical has been working to open new offices in states including New Jersey, New York and Ohio. 

Amazon said in January of 2024 that its pharmacy business “doubled the number of customers” it served in the past year, though it didn’t share specific figures. The company is opening pharmacies in 20 new cities this year, and about 45% of U.S. customers will be eligible for same-day medication delivery.

“If we can make one thing a little bit easier for a lot of people, we’ll save them a lot of time, a lot of money, and some lives,” Lindsay said. “And if we stack these changes up over time, it’ll feel like a reinvention.”

WATCH: Amazon Pharmacy VP: Trying to make it easier for patients to get medication

Amazon Pharmacy VP: Trying to make it easier for patients to get medication

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