Author: IBL News

IBL News | New York

OpenAI’s deployment arm made its second acquisition since its launch in May 2026, acquiring Northslope, an applied AI firm. The first one was Tomoro.

The terms of the Northslope deal were not disclosed, and the transaction is subject to customary regulatory approvals.

Backed by $4 billion to fund acquisitions, the OpenAI Deployment Company — which is majority-owned and controlled by OpenAI — is adding hundreds of forward-deployed engineers as a result of the purchase, who will work alongside customers to build AI systems within their organizations.

Northslope’s founders come from Palantir, which uses a similar strategy of embedding engineers directly with customers to build software around their operations.

Forward-deployed engineers bridge the gap between teams and employees who want to use AI models for specific tasks but may struggle to craft effective implementations on their own.

Anthropic is also building an AI services company to help mid-sized businesses use Claude.

IBL News | New York

OpenAI launched GPT-Live yesterday, an advanced voice model that mimics real dialogue, as it can listen and speak simultaneously while maintaining the flow of the conversation thanks to its full-duplex architecture. The API has not been issued yet.

During conversations, GPT‑Live can show it’s paying attention with phrases like “mhmm” or “yeah”, engage in quick back-and-forth, or just stay quiet when the user needs a moment to think.

Questions that require web search, deeper reasoning, or more complex work are delegated to OpenAI’s GPT‑5.5.

“Over time, we believe this research will also unlock the ability to use voice for increasingly complex, longer-running, and more agentic work,” said the company. “Our vision is to enable truly natural human–AI interaction: a world where collaborating with AI feels as fluid and responsive as working with another person, while reasoning and complex task execution happen seamlessly in the background.”

OpenAI rolled out globally two versions of GPT‑Live – GPT‑Live‑1 and GPT‑Live‑1 mini.