About 10 to 15 members of The Beast’s unionized editorial staff — about a third — are expected to take a buyout, according to two people familiar with the discussions. Mr. Sherwood and Ms. Coles are also planning to make cuts beyond the unionized staff.

A spokeswoman for The Daily Beast said the buyouts were part of a plan to reduce spending, increase revenue and put The Beast into a “healthy and sustainable financial position.”

“Everyone in digital media is facing tough choices,” the spokeswoman said. “These buyouts are especially hard because we know some talented and valued colleagues will decide to leave next month.”

The publication has historically lost millions of dollars annually, according to a person familiar with the matter, who said the company was planning to reach break-even at some point next year.

Ms. Coles, who is the chief creative and content officer, and Mr. Sherwood, the chief executive and publisher, have looked for other ways to cut costs, including using less office space. The Daily Beast is also moving away from its in-house publishing technology to one developed by another company, and it is bringing aboard digital subscription specialists to make the subscription process less cumbersome.

The Daily Beast’s audience has decreased substantially in recent years, according to two people familiar with the matter. It has about 100 workers.

Mr. Diller had looked at selling The Beast. He ultimately decided on the partnership with Ms. Coles and Mr. Sherwood as a turnaround effort.

OpenAI is aiming to move A.I. technology forward faster than its rivals, while also appeasing critics who say the technology is becoming increasingly dangerous, helping to spread disinformation, replace jobs and even threaten humanity. Experts disagree on when tech companies will reach artificial general intelligence, but companies including OpenAI, Google, Meta and Microsoft have steadily increased the power of A.I. technologies for more than a decade, demonstrating a noticeable leap roughly every two to three years.

OpenAI’s GPT-4, which was released in March 2023, enables chatbots and other software apps to answer questions, write emails, generate term papers and analyze data. An updated version of the technology, which was unveiled this month and is not yet widely available, can also generate images and respond to questions and commands in a highly conversational voice.

Days after OpenAI showed the updated version — called GPT-4o — the actress Scarlett Johansson said it used a voice that sounded “eerily similar to mine.” She said that she had declined efforts by OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman, to license her voice for the product and that she had hired a lawyer and asked OpenAI to stop using the voice. The company said the voice was not Ms. Johansson’s.

Technologies like GPT-4o learn their skills by analyzing vast amounts of digital data, including sounds, photos, videos, Wikipedia articles, books and news articles. The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in December, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems.

Digital “training” of A.I. models can take months or even years. Once the training is completed, A.I. companies typically spend several more months testing the technology and fine-tuning it for public use.

That could mean that OpenAI’s next model will not arrive for another nine months to a year or more.

As OpenAI trains its new model, its new Safety and Security committee will work to hone policies and processes for safeguarding the technology, the company said. The committee includes Mr. Altman, as well as the OpenAI board members Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo and Nicole Seligman. The company said the new policies could be in place in the late summer or fall.

This month, OpenAI said Ilya Sutskever, a co-founder and one of the leaders of its safety efforts, was leaving the company. This caused concern that OpenAI was not grappling enough with the dangers posed by A.I.

Dr. Sutskever had joined three other board members in November to remove Mr. Altman from OpenAI, saying Mr. Altman could no longer be trusted with the company’s plan to create artificial general intelligence for the good of humanity. After a lobbying campaign by Mr. Altman’s allies, he was reinstated five days later and has since reasserted control over the company.

Dr. Sutskever led what OpenAI called its Superalignment team, which explored ways of ensuring that future A.I. models would not do harm. Like others in the field, he had grown increasingly concerned that A.I. posed a threat to humanity.

Jan Leike, who ran the Superalignment team with Dr. Sutskever, resigned from the company this month, leaving the team’s future in doubt.

OpenAI has folded its long-term safety research into its larger efforts to ensure that its technologies are safe. That work will be led by John Schulman, another co-founder, who previously headed the team that created ChatGPT. The new safety committee will oversee Dr. Schulman’s research and provide guidance for how the company will address technological risks.

Chevron and the chief executive of Hess, John Hess, said in separate statements after the vote that they looked forward to completing the transaction.

Hess shares closed less than 1 percent higher on Tuesday.

Before the deal can close, Chevron would have to prevail in the arbitration case. Exxon’s chief executive, Darren Woods, told CNBC this month that the arbitration panel working on the case might not issue a decision until next year.

Mr. Hess, whose father started the company in 1933, had lobbied investors to vote for the deal in recent weeks. In at least one of those conversations, Mr. Hess said Chevron was not prepared to raise its offer, according to a person familiar with the matter.

In addition to Guyana, Hess’s portfolio includes oil and gas operations in North Dakota, the Gulf of Mexico and Southeast Asia.

Institutional Shareholder Services, a firm that advises investors on shareholder votes, urged Hess’s investors to withhold their support for the deal. Hess “shareholders bear the risk of a potentially broken deal without any compensation,” ISS wrote in a recent report.

Glass Lewis, another shareholder advisory firm, recommended that Hess’s investors sign off on the sale to Chevron, citing the strength of the larger oil company’s balance sheet, among other factors.

Deal-making among oil and gas producers surged last year to its highest level in more than a decade, as measured by deal value, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Exxon’s $60 billion purchase of the shale driller Pioneer Natural Resources, announced just before Chevron’s deal with Hess, closed this month.

Investors have approved all proposed U.S. oil and gas mergers that have been put to a vote since at least 2020, according to a Diligent Market Intelligence review of publicly disclosed results.

Mr. Cooper and his colleagues unearthed the Sotheby’s-bound stegosaurus in 2023. Digs on his property have yielded a number of Jurassic period dinosaurs, several of which Mr. Cooper has donated to institutions like the Brigham Young University Museum of Paleontology in Provo, Utah, and the Frost Museum of Science in Miami.

Mr. Cooper described the Apex stegosaurus as a unique and scientifically important specimen. Skeletons — even partial ones — of the plate-backed, spike-tailed herbivore are rare. The skeletal mount contains material from about 70 percent of the animal’s bones. At 11 feet tall and over 20 feet long, Apex is double the size of “Sophie,” the most intact stegosaurus specimen known, and has unusual proportions, remarkably long legs and square-bottom plates.

The specimen was also discovered with skin impressions, possibly from the neck, which will be offered as part of the sale.

Mr. Cooper supervised the preparation and mounting of the stegosaurus, 3D-scanning the existing bones and mirroring elements of the specimen to fill in the gaps. The team also collected extensive contextual data, which they think could be attractive to prospective buyers. The information includes a detailed site survey, quarry maps and other documentation.

Mr. Cooper also invited several paleontologists to examine the specimen.

“If you combine size, completeness and bone preservation, it is the best stegosaurus I’ve seen,” said Rod Scheetz, curator at the Brigham Young University Museum of Paleontology, who inspected it at Mr. Cooper’s property.

Cassandra Hatton, the head of Sotheby’s science and popular culture department, said the auction house worked closely with Mr. Cooper to reinforce the scientific legitimacy of this privately sold dinosaur mount, aiming to create a model for future auctions.

“This is the first time a specimen has been auctioned where we’ve been working together from the time it was excavated,” she said. “This is the most transparent sale of a dinosaur to have ever occurred.”

But Jim Kirkland, the state paleontologist of Utah, declined to endorse the stegosaurus when he was invited by Mr. Cooper. “It looks pretty interesting,” he wrote in an email, “but I will not promote something going to auction. I would have hooked him up with museums directly but not this.”

While anything can happen at a public auction, Mr. Cooper and Ms. Hatton both expressed their hopes that Apex will ultimately land at a scientific institution — whether through direct purchase or by donation from a private collector. The team gathered the data and documentation not just to reassure potential purchasers of the specimens’ authenticity but also to help museums smoothly integrate such a specimen into a research collection.

“Whoever purchases this also has the right to come to my property and collect contextual information,” Mr. Cooper said. “A private collector might not give a stego spike about that, but for a museum, that’d be really cool.”

However, the stegosaurus’s potential price tag could be out of reach for many institutions, Dr. Sumida said. He said that the costs of studying an already mounted and reconstructed specimen can be higher than just the purchase price. Reconstructing and mounting fossils is as much art as science — and specific choices can be used to hoodwink the uninitiated by blurring the lines on what parts of any given bone are real.

“If the specimen is as scientifically important as it’s purported, then they’re going about it entirely the wrong way,” Dr. Sumida said.

Cary Woodruff, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Frost Museum of Science in Miami, agreed that public auctions were often “scientific abbatoirs.” But Dr. Woodruff — who also examined the specimen before the auction agreement — suggested that compiling detailed records, pictures and digital scans of commercially sold fossils is something other sellers should emulate. That way, “at least a vestige of the scientific data can exist if the specimen does not end up in the public trust,” he said.

Ultimately, however, Dr. Woodruff concurred that the public trust is where such fossils belong.

“If a wealthy person were interested in how they could work with a scientific institution to make a contribution to scientific knowledge and advancement,” he said, “then I hope such specimens would attract their attention.”