Dozens of recently closed 99 Cents Only stores across the Southland could reopen with another bargain retailer’s logo outside: Dollar Tree.

The Chesapeake, Va.-based company, which operates hundreds of Dollar Tree and Family Dollar stores in California, reportedly made a bid on about 100 recently shuttered locations of 99 Cents Only, which announced last month that it was going out of business, according to a LinkedIn post from Bill Read, executive vice president of the real estate firm Retail Specialists.

The development, first reported by the Orange County Register, involves a handful of stores in Arizona, Nevada and Texas, but the vast majority are in Southern California, including in Lancaster, North Hollywood, Burbank, Long Beach and Riverside, according to Read’s post.

Dollar Tree did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A representative for 99 Cents Only could not be reached.

The 99 Cents Only chain — a longtime icon of L.A.’s discount retail world — started in 1982 with a single store on La Tijera Boulevard and expanded rapidly.

Before the City of Commerce company abruptly announced its closure in April — citing several factors, including shifting consumer demands and inflation — the chain had 371 locations.

But shelves quickly emptied out during liquidation sales, and several of the locations today are covered in graffiti.

Dollar Tree has faced financial turmoil of its own.

In 2014, Dollar Tree Inc. announced a plan to buy its big rival Family Dollar Stores Inc. for more than $8 billion — an acquisition that, according to the company’s website, brought its total to 15,000 stores. But this year, Dollar Tree announced a plan to close nearly 1,000 locations, including about 600 Family Dollar stores, in the first half of 2024, as well as several other Dollar Tree stores in the years ahead.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

ChatGPT creator OpenAI on Tuesday said it formed a safety and security committee to evaluate the company’s processes and safeguards as concerns mount over the use of rapidly developing artificial intelligence technology.

The committee is expected to take 90 days to finish its evaluation. After that, it will present the company’s full board with recommendations on critical safety and security decisions for OpenAI projects and operations, the firm said in a blog post.

The announcement comes after two high-level leaders, co-founder Ilya Sutskever and fellow executive Jan Leike, resigned from the company. Their departures raised concerns about the company’s priorities, because both had been focused on the importance of ensuring a safe future for humanity amid the rise of AI.

Sutskever and Leike led OpenAI’s so-called superalignment team, which was meant to create systems to curb the tech’s longterm risks. The group was tasked with “scientific and technical breakthroughs to steer and control AI systems much smarter than us.” Upon his departure, Leike said OpenAI’s “safety culture and processes have taken a backseat to shiny products.”

OpenAI’s new safety and security committee is led by board chair Bret Taylor, directors Adam D’Angelo and Nicole Seligman and Chief Executive Sam Altman. Multiple OpenAI technical and policy leaders are on the committee as well. OpenAI said that it will “retain and consult with other safety, security and technical experts to support this work.”

The committee’s formation arrives as the company begins work on training what it calls its “next frontier model” for artificial intelligence.

“While we are proud to build and release models that are industry-leading on both capabilities and safety, we welcome a robust debate at this important moment,” OpenAI said in its blog post.

Controversies about use of AI have dogged the San Francisco-based company, including in the entertainment business, which is worried about the technology’s implications for intellectual property and the potential displacement of jobs.

Actor Scarlett Johansson criticized the company last week over its handling of a ChatGPT voice feature that she and others said sounded eerily like her. Johansson, who voiced an AI program in the Oscar-winning Spike Jonze movie “Her,” said she was approached by Altman with a request to provide her voice, but she declined, only to later hear what sounded like her voice in an OpenAI demo.

OpenAI said that the voice featured in the demo was not Johansson’s, but another actor’s. After Johansson raised the alarm, OpenAI put a pause on its voice option, “Sky,” one of many human voices available on the app. An OpenAI spokesperson said the formation of the safety committee was not related to the issues involving Johansson.

OpenAI is best known for ChatGPT and Sora, a text to video tool that has major potential ramifications for filmmakers and studios.

OpenAI and other tech companies have been holding discussions with Hollywood, as the entertainment industry grapples with the long-term effects of AI on employment and creativity.

Some film and TV directors have said AI allows them to think more boldly, testing ideas without having the constraints of limited visual effects and travel budgets. Others worry that increased efficiency through AI tools could whittle away jobs in areas like makeup, production and animation.

As it faced safety questions, OpenAI’s business, which is backed by Microsoft, also must deal with competition from other companies that are building their own artificial intelligence tools and funding.

San Francisco-based Anthropic has received billions of dollars from Amazon and Google. On Sunday, xAI, which is led by Elon Musk, announced it closed on a $6-billion funding round that goes toward research and development, building its infrastructure and bringing its first products to market.

California restaurants finally have their answer: They, too, must comply with a new state law that bans unadvertised fees, surcharges and other costs tacked onto the end of the bill.

Starting July 1, restaurants will join thousands of other California businesses, including event ticket sellers, short-term rental apps, hotels and food delivery services, that are required to include all mandatory fees and charges in the prices they display or advertise.

The state attorney general’s office gave conflicting statements in the weeks after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed the measure into law last year, telling some news outlets that restaurants could continue to keep their current prices while listing any surcharges on their menus, and others that the surcharges had to be included in the prices themselves.

On Wednesday Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta’s office released a set of guidelines to clarify that issue and answer other questions about how businesses must comply with the new law. Bonta sponsored the measure, Senate Bill 478, along with its co-authors, state Sens. Bill Dodd (D-Napa) and Nancy Skinner (D-Berkeley).

For restaurants, that means it will no longer be enough to just list service charges and surcharges on a bill or a menu’s fine print. Instead, these charges must be included in the prices printed on the menu.

For example, a $20 mole enchilada at a restaurant that levies a 5% fee to cover employee health costs will have to be listed on the menu as a $21 mole enchilada. And a flier advertising a $10 lunch buffet at a restaurant that adds a mandatory 10% “service charge” will have to refer to the offer as an $11 lunch buffet.

In a statement, the Golden Gate Restaurant Assn. said Bonta’s guidelines “will create significant challenges for the restaurant industry moving forward.”

The association, which advocates for the restaurant industry, argues that by prohibiting the longtime practice of using service charges to increase staff pay or cover the cost of local ordinances — such as San Francisco’s requirement that businesses spend at least a minimum amount on healthcare services — the law will compound the problems faced by an already struggling industry.

“Diners will not pay less, instead they will see significant menu price increases, which we believe will further cause them to pull back on dining out,” the statement said. “Not only will restaurants struggle, but workers will lose hours and jobs.”

With few exceptions, businesses of all sorts across California will not be able to advertise, display or offer a price for their goods or services that does not include all of the “mandatory fees or charges” other than government-imposed taxes or fees or reasonable shipping costs, according to the measure’s authors.

“Put simply, the price a Californian sees should be the price they pay,” Bonta’s office said in a news release.

The new law doesn’t dictate what companies charge for their goods or services. Businesses will still be able to set prices, but the posted price will need to match the full amount a customer will see on their final bill.

Though businesses can exclude taxes and shipping charges, handling fees must be included. In other words, actual postage or delivery charges can be excluded, while the cost of pulling an item off a shelf and taking it to a shipping company has to be included in its advertised price.

Separate fees for optional services or features do not need to be advertised. This could extend to a bevy of industries and services — for example, the amount an airline charges for a seat upgrade or checked bags.

What about late fees or extra charges for customers who smoke in a hotel room? Because those charges can be avoided, they do not have to be advertised, according to the guidelines from Bonta’s office.

Businesses will not be allowed to skirt the law by advertising one price and then letting customers know that additional fees might be added later. A business can, however, list the full price of its product and provide customers a breakdown of all the fees that are included.

Bonta also offered some guidance for businesses that say they do not know up front what the final cost will be once their work is done. Such businesses “should wait to display a price until they know how much they will charge,” the guidelines say.

This could affect how live music fans interact with ticket sellers for concerts and other live events. The nonprofit watchdog Consumer Reports noted that hidden fees can increase the price of live-event tickets by 30% to 40%.

Live Nation Entertainment, parent company of ticketing giant Ticketmaster, said in a statement that it supported SB 478 and has already offered all-in pricing at some venues and festivals across the country. “Unfortunately, we routinely see resellers defy state laws requiring all-in pricing which confuses and harms fans, so we strongly encourage regulatory scrutiny to ensure compliance across the industry,” the company said.

The Virginia-based Travel Technology Assn., a global network of online travel agents, said it views transparency as a top priority but opposed SB 478 and would rather see a uniform national standard for regulations on lodging prices.

“We take this position to create uniformity and certainty for lodging operators, travel technology companies, and most of all, travelers, who will have a better understanding of what is included in advertised prices for trips both in and out of their home state,” President and Chief Executive Laura Chadwick said in a statement.

The online travel company Expedia opposed the bill for similar reasons.

In response to the argument, Bonta said that California does not need to wait for federal action to ensure transparency for consumers. The practice of hiding mandatory charges, he said in a statement, “is deceptive and unfair to consumers wherever it occurs — not just in certain industries.”